At a time of quick change, a big shout out to all the makers and spaces responding with an explosion of artistic dexterity. Art’s ability to go beyond boundaries is clear, but now there’s an added challenge – how to arrive at new ways of presenting work. Art has never been more aware of its relationship to society, and this month’s exhibitions re ect or create shifting structures and perspectives.
Corbans
Estate Arts Centre
1924 – Sosefina Andy, Ruby Joy Eade, Daphne Espiritu, Karen Rubado, Erica van Zon
From 8 October
ceac.org.nz
During lockdown many of us looked carefully at our surroundings, reflecting on how we really live in our homes when we’re not rushing out the door each morning and how spaces hold and shape family history. The year 1924 was the first that the Corban family lived in their new home. Almost 100 years later this exhibition presents a dynamic group of contemporary textile artists responding to and exploring the role of textiles in the home alongside the domestic heritage of what are now galleries but were once a parlour, a library, and bedrooms. Visitors can discover Sosefina Andy’s large, site-specific crochet wall taking form during the exhibition.
Melanie Roger Gallery
bababababa… –
Martin Poppelwell
Until 22 October
melanieroger
gallery.com
Working across drawing, painting, ceramics, installation, and sculpture Martin Poppelwell’s practice breaks down and reorganises networks across each medium. His unstructured grids disrupt, not relying on already established structural forms but inventing new ones. Allowing the formal structure to dissolve and reform, Poppelwell is prolific and adept mark maker whose work often incorporates gestural smudges, gridded lines, moments of intense colour, and language. New art works made over the past year take the diagram of painting into split and schismatic territory, repositioning form and content into something fresh and very moreish.
Martin Poppelwell
So I Shall Only Add That Every Hundred Yards Or So, I Stopped To Rest My Legs, The Good One As Well As The Bad, And Not Only My Legs, Not Only My Legs…
2021
Gus Fisher Gallery
I Multiply Each Day
Larry Achiampong, Christopher Ulutupu, Michelle Williams Gamaker
From 30 October
gusfishergallery.auckland.ac.nz
Examining our collective and personal histories as well as how we might participate in building a shared future is a vital issue at this moment in time. I Multiply Each Day is a mantra taken from British-Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong’s film Beyond the Substrata, a call to arms exploring threads of race, class, gender, and gentrification. Accompanied by a major new commission from local artist Christopher Ulutupu (Samoa/Niue/ Germany) and a film trilogy by Michelle Williams Gamaker (UK), this trio of leading moving image makers employs their own form of fictional activism to recast assumptions and explore histories of migration from a contemporary standpoint.
Presented by the Aotearoa Art Fair team, TENT is a long weekend of popup exhibitions and art events across the country. The inaugural edition has enticed 25 galleries, eight of which will be showing across Auckland, to present exhibitions and special events in venues other than their own. Spaces are an intriguing mix of the slick and unconventional, including a disused warehouse, industrial fabricators, and fashion stores. Alongside the exhibitions sit specially created online viewing rooms so each exhibition can be seen from wherever you’re based. Online preview: Thursday 4 November. Live exhibitions, curated walks, opportunities to meet artists, and special events, 5–7 November.
Artspace Aotearoa
When The Dust Settles
Online Auction
14–19 October
artspaceaotearoa.nz
Celebrating a game-changing 34 years with work by 34 artists key to the organisation’s history, When The Dust Settles is a series of four exhibitions culminating in a fundraising auction. Involving many of our most celebrated artists – Billy Apple, Fiona Pardington, Brett Graham, Dane Mitchell, Yvonne Todd – funds will contribute to an ambitious and exciting plan for an expanded Artspace Aotearoa including cinema, dedicated workshop, and artist residency studio. As the wider event adapts and unfolds digitally, an online catalogue with full details will launch ahead of the auction. Artspace champions artists, and 50% of the sale price is offered back to the makers. Auction hosted by Webb’s online portal.
Billy Apple®
Apple Turns To Gold
1983 / 2021
Online Alternatives: Check out these great offerings to get your contemporary art
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
The Govett-Brewster has launched a virtual tour of their acclaimed Brett Graham (Ngati Koroki Kahukura, Tainui) exhibition Tai Moana Tai Tangata earlier this year. Embedded into the online exhibition are layers of additional information and resources, including behind the scenes photos from the artist’s studio.
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
Watch Reuben Paterson (Ngati Rangitihi, Ngai Tuhoe, Tuhourangi) introduce his striking crystalline waka Guide Kaiarahi. Rising vertically from the gallery’s forecourt, the 10-metre-high sculpture seems to levitate above the forecourt pool and draws on the artist’s interest in the scienti c, material, and metaphysical properties of light.
Royal Academy of Arts
London’s Royal Academy offers a tour of their Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul exhibition. Both artists outraged contemporary society of their time and here Emin, who has made a career of her life exposed in messy closeup, pairs her work with that of Munch, best known for his iconic painting The Scream.
royalacademy.org.uk/article/virtualtour-tracey-emin-edvard-munch-video
