From Auckland to Dunedin, there are exhibitions opening, closing and continuing over the next few months. Here’s a selection (and there are more – let us know), starting with what’s finishing first.
In Wellington, this is the last week of Native Eye, a selection of photographs by Māori fashion designer and artist Suzanne Tamaki, displayed in large-scale lightboxed on Courtney Place. Curated by Reuben Friend, the lightboxes feature art-fashion garments and fashion photographs inspired by Māori interpretations of Western concepts such as feminism, or mana wāhine.
Courtney Place Park, to 31 May
In Auckland, the Pah Homestead has just opened Living Cloth, Textile Works from the Wallace Arts Trust Collection, curated by Harriet Matilda Rogers, 2018 Wallace Arts Trust Summer Intern. One of a group of summer interns, Harriet’s assembled an exhibition celebrating textiles and the ways that they surround us in our everyday lives, looking at how contemporary NZ artists have used textile materials or techniques in their work, and exploring the cross-over between art, craft, and decorative arts. Most works come from within the last 10 years, but there are also sprinkling of important pieces by major artists such as Gordon Crook and Malcolm Harrison.
Pah Homestead, 22 May – 8 July
Across town at Waitakere‘s Te Uru, textiles are among the media mix for Wellingon artist Erica van Zon’s Jade Tableau, part of a yearlong project of working with the colour green. Having printed images of Te Uru’s distinctive aluminium cladding onto silk, van Zon converts the Window Space into a surreal continuation of the building; inside the gallery, van Zon offers a range of media from beading and embroidery to steel work printed silk, whose forms and arrangement adhere to the visual structure of the grid.
Te Uru Contemporary Gallery, 1 May – 3 July 2018
And back in Dunedin, word is getting out about Kawita Vatanajyankur’s installation, Performing Textiles, which was the work developed while she was in New Zealand in 2017 as part of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s Visiting Artist Programme. The works combine her body with techniques involved in manufacturing textiles, in a thoughtful, provocative and moving suite of images.
Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 5 May – 26 August
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If you’re nowhere any of these exhibitions, you may also like to check out the NZ Fashion Museum’s new online exhibition Remember the 80s: On the Edge, Over the Top. Those of us who were there might think the over the top thing’s a bit OTT itself – but check it out for yourselves; you may have some classic 80s garments to add to the museum’s virtual collection as well.