Current Exhibitions
Lyndsay Patterson, Murrine Oriental
WANGANUI GLASS 2010
7 August - 3 October, 2010
Since the establishment of a glass department at the Wanganui Regional Polytechnic in 1987, Wanganui has become known as a centre of excellence for glass practice. In 2006, the Ministry of Social Development provided Creative Communities funding for a glass facilitator to support and build the glass sector in Wanganui. One successful initiative has been the establishment of a Festival of Glass, with this year being the fifth. Organisation of this year’s festival, which will run from 18 September–3 October, has been taken up by the Wanganui Glass Group.
As part of this year’s festival, the Sarjeant Gallery is pleased to present a selection of work by glass artists who are currently living and working in Wanganui or who are graduates of the glass programme in Wanganui. The varied selection of work is a true reflection of the diversity of glass as a medium and is testament to why glass has gained in popularity in recent years. The exhibition includes the work of recent graduates and well-established practitioners, all of whom explore the medium in challenging and engaging ways.
We hope you enjoy this selection.
Fiona Amundsen, Looking towards Sorazaya Bridge, Hiroshima
FIONA AMUNDSEN: The First City in History
7 August - 3 October, 2010
The First City in History is the most recent body of work from Auckland-based artist Fiona Amundsen. With a background in social anthropology, Amundsen’s practice investigates how photography operates on social and cultural levels. This suite of seven photographs features the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the first city in history subjected to nuclear warfare when it was bombed by the United States of America on 6 August, 1945, during World War II. Amundsen comments: “The First City in History is a sustained photographic investigation into the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the Genbaku Dome, the Aioi Bridge and the surrounding walkways. This project seeks to explore the disparity between the uniquely subjective experiences of being in such historically loaded sites and their representation through photography. This project also plays on the socio-cultural understanding of both site and photography, the former linked to how photographs actually do reveal something about what they depict, while the latter is grounded in the notion that space itself is always ‘cultural’. Subsequently, what these photographs disclose has more to do with the invisible structures that make up a city but can’t necessarily be seen in a photograph – things like politics, economics, the social and cultural profiles of a city, its history, all of which influence how a city ends up looking. Ultimately, the core ideas of this project involve an investigation into how socio-cultural historical narratives are preserved and then re-enacted through this city’s public spaces.”
The opening of the exhibition coincided with the 65th anniversary of the bombing. The exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of the Asia NZ Foundation, AUT Auckland University of Technology and NZJEP (New Zealand-Japan Exchange Programme).
Rodney Fumpston, Fernbook, 1991
RODNEY FUMPSTON: Prints
10 July - 29 August, 2010
The Sarjeant Gallery’s association with artist Rodney Fumpston stretches back to the early 1980s, when the gallery mounted a survey exhibition of Fumpston’s work. In 2004, the gallery mounted a comprehensive survey covering thirty years of the artist’s practice. Subsequently, Rodney generously gifted the entire body of work to the Sarjeant’s permanent collection. Six years on, we have an opportunity to reflect on this extraordinary gift and offer visitors a chance to view a small selection of works that cover Fumpston’s prolific output.
A master printmaker, arguably one of the country’s finest, Rodney has been dedicated to the medium since he first fell in love with it as a fine arts student at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University. Overseas travel has inspired much of his work. From England, Egypt, the Pacific and New Zealand, this small selection of works provides an overview of Rodney’s travels. Bright and breezy to quiet and intimate, the selection provides a rich tapestry of printmaking techniques and varied themes.
As with much of the Sarjeant Gallery’s collection, we often have the generosity of artists and collectors to be extremely thankful for, and this exhibition is one such example.
Colour - Installation at the Sarjeant Gallery
COLOUR
19 June – 14 November, 2010
Colour is an exhibition drawn from the collections of the Sarjeant Gallery and the Whanganui Regional Museum. From the monochrome to the many-coloured, this exhibition spans two collections and two venues and puts colour on display through a diverse array of artworks and objects.
Colours describe how something looks, but they also have cultural meanings. In putting this exhibition together we have tried to think of colour broadly: as appearance and as abstract associations. Every now and then, visitors will find an object that is a different colour from the rest of the objects in that section. This isn’t a mistake but a way of pointing out the different dimensions that colours have in human societies.
An example of this is an artificial limb, a particularly brutal prosthetic, more machine than man, yet it symbolizes pink through a connection to the body, to cosmetics. ‘In the pink’ is a state of mind, of wholeness, and this artificial leg is a device for making whole – correcting – what has been lost, just as pink blush can mimic the healthy flush of blood under the skin – what is called a healthy glow.
The exhibition has allowed us to bring together a diverse range of artworks and objects that have not been seen together before, including a number of items that have local relevance, including a port light that was sited on the banks of the Whanganui River, a weighty door from the Rutland Stockade that was situated in Queens’s Park and an impressive but menacing black x-ray machine.
There are fifty-seven works featured by fifty-one artists from the Sarjeant’s collection. They include Robert McLeod, Philip Clairmont, Paratene Matchitt, Don Driver and Gretchen Albrecht and Yvonne Todd, to name a few.
The exhibition features eleven colours. At the Sarjeant you’ll find grey, pink, purple, brown and orange, while at the Whanganui Regional Museum you’ll see black, red, yellow, blue, green and white.
By mixing artworks and objects – from the thickly-painted surface of an oil on canvas to the plush fur of a stuffed animal – this exhibition looks at how colour shapes our response to the environment, to each other and to the things that surround us in our lives.
Greg Donson and Damian Skinner, curators
Open Award winner Catherine Macdonald with Prue Anderson, from Carey Smith & Co. Ltd, principal sponsor of the Arts Review.
2010 Carey Smith & Co Whanganui Arts Review
10 July – 5 September, 2010
With more than 400 people attending the opening of this years Arts Review, it’s no surprise that this annual exhibition is a highlight of our programme. Generously sponsored by local chartered accountancy firm Carey Smith & Co. Ltd, who provide sponsorship for the five main prizes, the exhibition is open to any artist living in the Whanganui region. Now in its twenty-second year, 2010 offers visitors an opportunity to view a huge range of work in a variety of media from a wide spectrum of artists.
This year, 144 artists submitted work and from these 98 works were selected for the exhibition by Greg Donson, Curator/Public Programmes Manager at the Sarjeant, Nicola Jennings, Curator and Team Leader Art at Te Manawa, and Julian Priest, artist/co-founder of the Green Bench Project Room. This year’s judge was Helen Telford, Assistant Director of the Govett Brewster Art Gallery.
The prizes were awarded to the following recipients: Carey Smith & Co. Ltd $1000 Open Award to Catherine Macdonald; Carey Smith & Co, Ltd $500 Student Award to E.C. McNamara, Carey Smith & Co. Ltd $250 Highly Commended Awards (x3) to Fiona McGowan, Kaye Wooding and Kirk Nicholls.
Merit awards received by Andre Bronnimann, J.K. Russ, Tom Turner, Amy Fitzgerald, Sue James, Bonnie Wroe and Stacey Hildreth were generously sponsored by River City Picture Framers Ltd, Jolt Coffee House, Central City Pharmacy, Ceramic Lounge, Flying Fox and Members of the Sarjeant Gallery.
Helen Telford comments on Catherine Macdonald's open award winning work, A Place where things Really Happen: "This evocative work consists of a number of drawings – of fragments of things seen and an accompanying artist’s book. This is my second encounter with Catherine’s work and as thrilling as the first. In the context of Whanganui and the Sarjeant, the drawings bring to mind Joanna Paul. The everyday things, the things glimpsed, the empty white space leaving imagination to roam. Joanna also worked with words, making books, poetry, beauty even. Catherine’s texts are not that – they are of a grittier, grungier, fictional everyday – but one we can feel to be true. I was also thrilled that drawing won out at the end of the day. It is a modest yet deeply expressive medium that can easily be overlooked and under-rated. Congratulations Catherine.“
The gallery would like to congratulate all the award-winning artists and all those who entered the exhibition, as well as Helen Telford for judging this year’s exhibition in such a considered and engaging manner. We would also like to thank Carey Smith & Co. Ltd, Chartered Accountants, and the above-listed local businesses for their ongoing support of this community exhibition.
Lyndsay Patterson, Murrine Oriental
WANGANUI GLASS 2010
7 August - 3 October, 2010
Since the establishment of a glass department at the Wanganui Regional Polytechnic in 1987, Wanganui has become known as a centre of excellence for glass practice. In 2006, the Ministry of Social Development provided Creative Communities funding for a glass facilitator to support and build the glass sector in Wanganui. One successful initiative has been the establishment of a Festival of Glass, with this year being the fifth. Organisation of this year’s festival, which will run from 18 September–3 October, has been taken up by the Wanganui Glass Group.
As part of this year’s festival, the Sarjeant Gallery is pleased to present a selection of work by glass artists who are currently living and working in Wanganui or who are graduates of the glass programme in Wanganui. The varied selection of work is a true reflection of the diversity of glass as a medium and is testament to why glass has gained in popularity in recent years. The exhibition includes the work of recent graduates and well-established practitioners, all of whom explore the medium in challenging and engaging ways.
We hope you enjoy this selection.
Fiona Amundsen, Looking towards Sorazaya Bridge, Hiroshima
FIONA AMUNDSEN: The First City in History
7 August - 3 October, 2010
The First City in History is the most recent body of work from Auckland-based artist Fiona Amundsen. With a background in social anthropology, Amundsen’s practice investigates how photography operates on social and cultural levels. This suite of seven photographs features the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the first city in history subjected to nuclear warfare when it was bombed by the United States of America on 6 August, 1945, during World War II. Amundsen comments: “The First City in History is a sustained photographic investigation into the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the Genbaku Dome, the Aioi Bridge and the surrounding walkways. This project seeks to explore the disparity between the uniquely subjective experiences of being in such historically loaded sites and their representation through photography. This project also plays on the socio-cultural understanding of both site and photography, the former linked to how photographs actually do reveal something about what they depict, while the latter is grounded in the notion that space itself is always ‘cultural’. Subsequently, what these photographs disclose has more to do with the invisible structures that make up a city but can’t necessarily be seen in a photograph – things like politics, economics, the social and cultural profiles of a city, its history, all of which influence how a city ends up looking. Ultimately, the core ideas of this project involve an investigation into how socio-cultural historical narratives are preserved and then re-enacted through this city’s public spaces.”
The opening of the exhibition coincided with the 65th anniversary of the bombing. The exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of the Asia NZ Foundation, AUT Auckland University of Technology and NZJEP (New Zealand-Japan Exchange Programme).
Since the establishment of a glass department at the Wanganui Regional Polytechnic in 1987, Wanganui has become known as a centre of excellence for glass practice. In 2006, the Ministry of Social Development provided Creative Communities funding for a glass facilitator to support and build the glass sector in Wanganui. One successful initiative has been the establishment of a Festival of Glass, with this year being the fifth. Organisation of this year’s festival, which will run from 18 September–3 October, has been taken up by the Wanganui Glass Group.
As part of this year’s festival, the Sarjeant Gallery is pleased to present a selection of work by glass artists who are currently living and working in Wanganui or who are graduates of the glass programme in Wanganui. The varied selection of work is a true reflection of the diversity of glass as a medium and is testament to why glass has gained in popularity in recent years. The exhibition includes the work of recent graduates and well-established practitioners, all of whom explore the medium in challenging and engaging ways.
We hope you enjoy this selection.
We hope you enjoy this selection.
Fiona Amundsen, Looking towards Sorazaya Bridge, Hiroshima
7 August - 3 October, 2010
The First City in History is the most recent body of work from Auckland-based artist Fiona Amundsen. With a background in social anthropology, Amundsen’s practice investigates how photography operates on social and cultural levels. This suite of seven photographs features the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the first city in history subjected to nuclear warfare when it was bombed by the United States of America on 6 August, 1945, during World War II. Amundsen comments: “The First City in History is a sustained photographic investigation into the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the Genbaku Dome, the Aioi Bridge and the surrounding walkways. This project seeks to explore the disparity between the uniquely subjective experiences of being in such historically loaded sites and their representation through photography. This project also plays on the socio-cultural understanding of both site and photography, the former linked to how photographs actually do reveal something about what they depict, while the latter is grounded in the notion that space itself is always ‘cultural’. Subsequently, what these photographs disclose has more to do with the invisible structures that make up a city but can’t necessarily be seen in a photograph – things like politics, economics, the social and cultural profiles of a city, its history, all of which influence how a city ends up looking. Ultimately, the core ideas of this project involve an investigation into how socio-cultural historical narratives are preserved and then re-enacted through this city’s public spaces.”
The opening of the exhibition coincided with the 65th anniversary of the bombing. The exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of the Asia NZ Foundation, AUT Auckland University of Technology and NZJEP (New Zealand-Japan Exchange Programme).
Rodney Fumpston, Fernbook, 1991
RODNEY FUMPSTON: Prints
10 July - 29 August, 2010
The Sarjeant Gallery’s association with artist Rodney Fumpston stretches back to the early 1980s, when the gallery mounted a survey exhibition of Fumpston’s work. In 2004, the gallery mounted a comprehensive survey covering thirty years of the artist’s practice. Subsequently, Rodney generously gifted the entire body of work to the Sarjeant’s permanent collection. Six years on, we have an opportunity to reflect on this extraordinary gift and offer visitors a chance to view a small selection of works that cover Fumpston’s prolific output.
A master printmaker, arguably one of the country’s finest, Rodney has been dedicated to the medium since he first fell in love with it as a fine arts student at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University. Overseas travel has inspired much of his work. From England, Egypt, the Pacific and New Zealand, this small selection of works provides an overview of Rodney’s travels. Bright and breezy to quiet and intimate, the selection provides a rich tapestry of printmaking techniques and varied themes.
As with much of the Sarjeant Gallery’s collection, we often have the generosity of artists and collectors to be extremely thankful for, and this exhibition is one such example.
Colour - Installation at the Sarjeant Gallery
COLOUR
19 June – 14 November, 2010
Colour is an exhibition drawn from the collections of the Sarjeant Gallery and the Whanganui Regional Museum. From the monochrome to the many-coloured, this exhibition spans two collections and two venues and puts colour on display through a diverse array of artworks and objects.
Colours describe how something looks, but they also have cultural meanings. In putting this exhibition together we have tried to think of colour broadly: as appearance and as abstract associations. Every now and then, visitors will find an object that is a different colour from the rest of the objects in that section. This isn’t a mistake but a way of pointing out the different dimensions that colours have in human societies.
An example of this is an artificial limb, a particularly brutal prosthetic, more machine than man, yet it symbolizes pink through a connection to the body, to cosmetics. ‘In the pink’ is a state of mind, of wholeness, and this artificial leg is a device for making whole – correcting – what has been lost, just as pink blush can mimic the healthy flush of blood under the skin – what is called a healthy glow.
The exhibition has allowed us to bring together a diverse range of artworks and objects that have not been seen together before, including a number of items that have local relevance, including a port light that was sited on the banks of the Whanganui River, a weighty door from the Rutland Stockade that was situated in Queens’s Park and an impressive but menacing black x-ray machine.
There are fifty-seven works featured by fifty-one artists from the Sarjeant’s collection. They include Robert McLeod, Philip Clairmont, Paratene Matchitt, Don Driver and Gretchen Albrecht and Yvonne Todd, to name a few.
The exhibition features eleven colours. At the Sarjeant you’ll find grey, pink, purple, brown and orange, while at the Whanganui Regional Museum you’ll see black, red, yellow, blue, green and white.
By mixing artworks and objects – from the thickly-painted surface of an oil on canvas to the plush fur of a stuffed animal – this exhibition looks at how colour shapes our response to the environment, to each other and to the things that surround us in our lives.
Greg Donson and Damian Skinner, curators
Open Award winner Catherine Macdonald with Prue Anderson, from Carey Smith & Co. Ltd, principal sponsor of the Arts Review.
2010 Carey Smith & Co Whanganui Arts Review
10 July – 5 September, 2010
With more than 400 people attending the opening of this years Arts Review, it’s no surprise that this annual exhibition is a highlight of our programme. Generously sponsored by local chartered accountancy firm Carey Smith & Co. Ltd, who provide sponsorship for the five main prizes, the exhibition is open to any artist living in the Whanganui region. Now in its twenty-second year, 2010 offers visitors an opportunity to view a huge range of work in a variety of media from a wide spectrum of artists.
This year, 144 artists submitted work and from these 98 works were selected for the exhibition by Greg Donson, Curator/Public Programmes Manager at the Sarjeant, Nicola Jennings, Curator and Team Leader Art at Te Manawa, and Julian Priest, artist/co-founder of the Green Bench Project Room. This year’s judge was Helen Telford, Assistant Director of the Govett Brewster Art Gallery.
The prizes were awarded to the following recipients: Carey Smith & Co. Ltd $1000 Open Award to Catherine Macdonald; Carey Smith & Co, Ltd $500 Student Award to E.C. McNamara, Carey Smith & Co. Ltd $250 Highly Commended Awards (x3) to Fiona McGowan, Kaye Wooding and Kirk Nicholls.
Merit awards received by Andre Bronnimann, J.K. Russ, Tom Turner, Amy Fitzgerald, Sue James, Bonnie Wroe and Stacey Hildreth were generously sponsored by River City Picture Framers Ltd, Jolt Coffee House, Central City Pharmacy, Ceramic Lounge, Flying Fox and Members of the Sarjeant Gallery.
Helen Telford comments on Catherine Macdonald's open award winning work, A Place where things Really Happen: "This evocative work consists of a number of drawings – of fragments of things seen and an accompanying artist’s book. This is my second encounter with Catherine’s work and as thrilling as the first. In the context of Whanganui and the Sarjeant, the drawings bring to mind Joanna Paul. The everyday things, the things glimpsed, the empty white space leaving imagination to roam. Joanna also worked with words, making books, poetry, beauty even. Catherine’s texts are not that – they are of a grittier, grungier, fictional everyday – but one we can feel to be true. I was also thrilled that drawing won out at the end of the day. It is a modest yet deeply expressive medium that can easily be overlooked and under-rated. Congratulations Catherine.“
The gallery would like to congratulate all the award-winning artists and all those who entered the exhibition, as well as Helen Telford for judging this year’s exhibition in such a considered and engaging manner. We would also like to thank Carey Smith & Co. Ltd, Chartered Accountants, and the above-listed local businesses for their ongoing support of this community exhibition.