Column | Mark Amery: Visual Arts

By Mark Amery Read More »

By Mark Amery

With summer seemingly cancelled for the Wellington region, TheNewDowse’s programme in Lower Hutt has been one true hot spot. It’s inspiring to enter an art museum full of adults and children engaging with bright, adventurous art and design that feels very much of its cultural moment. Read More »

By Mark Amery

2009 was the year we got to see what Wellington looks like without City Gallery, with our major contemporary art institution closed for most of the year for a major extension.

City Gallery’s absence emphasised the impressive array of visual arts activity happening beyond it. Read More »

By Mark Amery

For over ten years Photospace in Courtenay Place has been providing a home for photographers. The only gallery dedicated to photography in Wellington it’s big on inclusiveness, steered by a dynamo of a man with a keen eye and a passionate advocate for photographers, James Gilberd. Read More »

By Mark Amery

If just as likely to be labeled borderline psychotic as psychic, artists have nevertheless often been seen as able to unlock the doors of perception to the unknown, the unseen and the inexplicable. To dabble in the mysteries. To make visible that beyond what we usually see. Read More »

By Mark Amery

To see an excellent example of how some dealer galleries are increasingly behaving like public ones, cross the road from City Gallery to Page Blackie off Chews Lane. Read More »

By Mark Amery

This month there’s an impressive array of contemporary Maori art practice on display in the Wellington region. Read More »

By Mark Amery

No matter the advances in digital technology, your travel snaps are always going to disappoint. They require your personal animation to convey the perception of what it was like to experience a strange foreign landscape. Read More »

By Mark Amery

While writers seem to get away with writing one great novel or play in five, we seem to have a terrible propensity to write off a visual artist based on a single encounter. Read More »

By Mark Amery 

Art doesn’t capture a moment in time, like a snapshot or a document. It’s about the fluidity of time, the sensations surrounding the memory of moments; the sense of life flowing from the past through the present and into the future. Read More »

By Mark Amery

Sandwiched in between music venue San Francisco Bathhouse and a vegetarian restaurant in Cuba Street, the South Coast Gallery is a slender wee slip of a salon. It provides an inner city base for a gallery that has already gained a solid reputation for its representation of an eclectic range of interesting artists. Read More »

By Mark Amery

The expression to “kick against the pricks”, originates in the bible and can be defined to mean to fight against authority. That’s quite a natural activity of artists, looking to engender debate and breath new air into things. Yet there’s also every sign at present that art institutions - often those kicked against - also want in on exploring what that kicking right now might mean. Read More »

By Mark Amery

It’s no wonder that artists are increasingly turning to reuse objects as a basis for art. Everyday, society is asking us to look harder at the piles of inorganic packaging and furniture that surround us, leading to us rather guiltily consider their contribution to our future on the planet. Read More »

By Mark Amery - Originally published in Massey Research Magazine, 2008

Consider if you will the camera as a gate. A gate providing access to other worlds through the walls that bound our current experience of the world. Read More »

By Mark Amery

It doesn’t seem so long ago that video art was treated like the grubby, fuzzy unsaleable black sheep of the fine art family. In these days of the DVD projector and widescreen you’re now expected to have a good artistic reason for littering a gallery with trails of cords and an assortment of second hand TV monitors. Read More »

By Mark Amery

The museum with the hot pink boys’ bathrooms, TheNewDowse isn’t so new anymore. Reopening in 2007 after an extensive refit, this dynamic institution does however have a new director, Cam McCracken. And the current suite of exhibitions, which talk beautifully to each other, augur well for his term. Read More »

By Mark Amery

It was perhaps telling of how the geography of the art world has been shifting that at this month’s Auckland Art Fair – essentially New Zealand’s contemporary art fair - the number of Wellington art dealers selling their wares (seven) was only just above those from Melbourne and Sydney apiece. Read More »

By Mark Amery

It used to be pretty hard for an artist to escape a label. Never mind what 20th century movement you were pegged to (“is she a neo abstract expressionist, or a surrealist?”), in the ‘80s you might be roundly labeled a feminist, or in the ‘90s a postcolonialist. Read More »

By Mark Amery

From the extravagance of goldfish in bowls given seats on a flight above Auckland to an enormous barricade made out of junk across Wellington’s Stout Street, since last year temporary artworks have been unveiled across the country as part of One Day Sculpture. Read More »

Sculpture often provides us with conversations between nature and culture. Be it the little regular piles of wood shavings that appeared around the base of Wellington’s Kauri Old Government Buildings last Thursday, like the evidence of cultivated termites - Roman Ondak’s part of the One Day Sculpture programme - or the curvy outline of a figure against hill and sky, what we shape and construct out of nature is framed by it. Read More »

By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post Read More »

By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post Read More »

By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post Today he is the epitome of inoffensive behaviour, but once even Monet was an art-world bad boy. We need artists to perplex us with what might seem like mindless acts of violence on what we consider to be art. Artists misbehaving to push ideas into new ground and challenge the status quo. Which is why across town from Monet at Te Papa it's comforting to see photographer Bruce Connew title an exhibition 'I Must Behave'. It suggests he has no intention of doing so. Read More »

Tom Scott's The Daylight Atheist has been published as part of Playmarket's New Zealand Play Series, a series devoted to ensuring major New Zealand works for the stage reach the readership and audience they deserve.

It will be released on 'Black Friday', February the 13th at the Irish Pub Kitty O'Shea's in Wellington, with actors Grant Tilly and Danny Mulheron reading and providing bonhomie. Read More »

By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

Opening Tuesday night at DAF106 Gallery was BA$H by Ruby Nekk. Nekk's art is billed as guaranteed to retain its value, and able to be "disassembled and recycled directly into money and materials." An astonishingly good idea; decide whether its good art by visiting 106 Aro Street. Meanwhile at Chaffers Gallery is A Little Piece of Treasure, a group show billed as having "nothing over $1000".

Those are both signs of an increasing interest in art's monetary value. Interest at a time when I find I'm often being asked as a conversation starter whether galleries are closing in the face of hard times. Read More »

By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

Nothing more epitomises the awkwardness of Te Papa's internal architecture and its status as national-gallery-as-afterthought than its Sculpture Terrace.

Where? Many will ask. A roof area requiring two separate lift rides to visit, I still regularly lose my bearings finding it. The work commissioned for this space is generally excellent, but it often looks as in keeping with its surroundings as a prized painting might in your broom cupboard. Read More »

By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

Last Wednesday night Wellington city residents were subject to a practise run for a new tsunami and civil defence warning system. A helicopter carrying loudspeakers baffled some residents with its loud pre-recorded message of "get ready to get through". The temptation for artists to hijack the aircraft later and broadcast their own cryptic messages must have been strong.

In a great stroke of timing, the next day saw The Flood, My Chanting, a performance work by Amy Howden-Chapman commissioned by City Gallery, part of a series of so-called One Day Sculptures nationwide. Read More »

By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

18th century English artist William Hogarth has been credited with inventing the comic strip. Yet the complexity of many of his intensely detailed satires, set in a bustling, gossiping London, with narratives created out of serial prints leave even the most sophisticated comic strips wanting. Read More »

By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

I'm getting '70s flashbacks at Enjoy Gallery at present. Recall of my father's friends propensity to show off their immaculate, expensive wooden encased hi-fi systems by playing Pink Floyd's seductively sleek Dark Side of the Moon really, really loud. I was forced to sit silently in the middle of rooms listening to the album in its entirety: alarm clocks jolting you from one speaker, a subterranean pulse from another - an experience that's left me suspicious that art which impresses you with shiny whistles and bells is masquerading a marshmallow centre.

Tony Nicholls' impeccably crafted sound sculptures prove far more interesting than this first impression. Read More »

By Mark Amery Courtesy of The Dominion Post

Question. What do the following established and acclaimed contemporary New Zealand women artists have in common? Fiona Pardington, Jacqueline Fraser, Jacqueline Fahey, Judy Millar, and Margaret Dawson. Answer: none have had survey exhibitions at City Gallery Wellington. Read More »