EXHIBITIONS 2018

Small Space: Manon van Kouswijk

Ornamental Residue originates from a study into the typology of brooches. For this series, Melbourne-based jeweller Manon van Kouswijk applies a range of processes and abstractions to iconic brooch forms and motifs from the history of jewellery. These brooches are formed by pouring liquid clay over a series of tightly grouped spherical forms, leaving an inverse of her original creations – a residue of her processes made wearable.

23 January 2018 — 12 March 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Pocket Histories

Pocket Histories — developed in collaboration between curator Ioana Gordon-Smith and artist Imogen Taylor as the latter’s McCahon House post-residency exhibition — considers the sampling of modernism in the work of three artists. Together, these works show a clear interest in formal geometric play; the push, pull and fit of volume, shapes, curves, colour.

10 February 2018 — 13 May 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Kerry Ann Lee: life should be simple and good

For this commissioned project, Lee continues her interest in the relationship between craft, identity and place by drawing upon the specialist craft knowledge and legacies associated with West Auckland. The Learning Centre gallery is re-imagined as a whimsical garden - a space loaded with concepts of home and belonging. Here, visitors are invited to create a pot plant with twigs, clay and paper.

17 February 2018 — 21 June 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Window Space: Glen Hayward

Using only wood and paint, artist Glen Hayward constructs a wall of concrete blocks to site a series of pre-existing objects in Te Uru’s front Window Space. These recognisable builder’s objects – including a beer bottle, lunchbox, cigarettes and hard hat – point to the mode of their own construction and labour intensive origins.

27 February 2018 — 30 April 2018  |  See exhibition detail

From Scratch: 546 Moons

Auckland Arts Festival and Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery present an interactive survey exhibition on the sonic innovation and invented instruments of renowned art/music ensemble From Scratch, including six performances by the latest incarnation of the group. Formed in 1974, From Scratch have performed to wide acclaim around the world with their distinctive invented instruments – 546 moon cycles and still spinning!

3 March 2018 — 27 May 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Phillip Fickling: The Fragile Sea

Phillip Fickling is a paper engineer with a significant background in handcrafted paper objects, books and sculptures. In this exhibition Fickling presents a display of carefully sculpted paper creatures - part animal, part machine - of a fictional era inspired by industrial design. The still and stark white paper gives way to imagined colours, movements and interactions between the underwater beings swimming through the exhibition space.

13 March 2018 — 30 April 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Erica van Zon: Jade Tableau

For Jade Tableau, Wellington-based artist Erica van Zon continues a yearlong project of working with the colour green, engaging two sites at Te Uru: the external Window Space and the Small Space located inside. For this project Van Zon finds prompts for creativity throughout her immediate surroundings, where the shimmering surface of water, the trellis at a fruit shop or the cladding of a building can all be of interest to the artist.

1 May 2018 — 3 July 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Gabrielle Amodeo: Blind Carbon Copy: an open love letter

For Blind Carbon Copy: An Open Love Letter, Amodeo delves into the representation and signifiers of intimacy. Working autobiographically, this series of works addresses the placeholders used to acknowledge and commemorate romantic relationships, where poignancy sits alongside an inevitable inefficacy.

19 May 2018 — 5 August 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Stephen Ellis: Headforemost

For this exhibition Stephen Ellis reimagines the settling of William Cornwallis Symonds' unbuilt city at Cornwallis, the last remnant of which is its rebuilt wharf. Ellis reimagines the settlement through scale models, which serve as the basis for a series of large ballpoint pen drawings.

19 May 2018 — 5 August 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Dark Horizons

Dark Horizons is a suite of three interconnected solo exhibitions exploring this state of global anxiety through the lens of Muslim migrant communities in Australia. The artists in the exhibition are Malaysian and Anglo-Australian brothers Abdul Abdullah and Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, and leading Lebanese-Australian moving image artist Khaled Sabsabi.

2 June 2018 — 19 August 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Nga Tohu o Te Kawerau a Maki: the people, their stories and treasures

Ka titiro whakamuri, me anga whakamua - We look back so that we forge ahead! Te Kawerau a Maki present a collection of images of tupuna (forebears) and taonga (treasures) to remember and celebrate their heritage as they work toward a better future.

30 June 2018 — 26 August 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Josephine Cachemaille: FEELS

Heaped, hanging, climbing and draping, FEELS is an installation by artist Josephine Cachemaille. Working with a range of precious, crafted and familiar objects, FEELS composes hybrid sculpture/paintings into a lively, suggestive and humorous assemblage.

4 July 2018 — 4 September 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Maureen Lander: Flat-Pack Whakapapa

For Flat-Pack Whakapapa, Maureen Lander has created three installations that explore the connections between whakapapa and raranga (M?ori weaving). Approaching these forms of human connection from a m?tauranga M?ori (M?ori knowledge) perspective, Lander engages with weaving techniques—including whiri (braiding) and whakairo (patterning)—and the concept of aho tuku iho (ancestral lines handed down continuously from generation to generation).

11 August 2018 — 18 November 2018  |  See exhibition detail

From the Shore

From the Shore considers the influence of M?ori filmmakers Barry Barclay and Merata Mita on a current generation of artists. Through their work in film, television and writing, Barclay and Mita set out some core concerns of indigenous filmmaking internationally, ranging from control over production through to community-based models of filming and upending technical conventions, such as staged interviews. Featuring work by Tracey Moffatt, Tanu Gago, Rob George, Nova Paul, Lisa Reihana and Tuafale Tanoa'i aka Linda T.

1 September 2018 — 4 November 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Billy Apple: The Cut Away

This Small Space project is an institutional Critique by Billy Apple, who has proposed that Te Uru fill in the cut away to complete the south wall of Gallery One. This is part of an ongoing series, started in the 1970s, in which Apple has critiqued the ways that exhibition spaces function. In doing so, he makes the institutional context the subject of his work, and therefore the gallery itself becomes the work.

6 September 2018 — 4 October 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Envoys Onwards

In 1993, the Association of Women Artists initiated a celebratory exhibition of postcards to mark the 100-year anniversary of the winning of emancipation by New Zealand women. The exhibition was held in 1996 at what was then called Lopdell House Gallery (now Te Uru). Now, in 2018, in the 125th anniversary year of that achievement, Te Uru and representatives of the association will be re-showing the original postcards and inviting a new generation of women artists to create postcards to show alongside the original set.

8 September 2018 — 28 October 2018  |  See exhibition detail

Kelly McDonald: Portrait of Jewellery

Wellington-based jeweller Kelly McDonald uses materials from traditionally masculine and utilitarian fields for creating objects of fine art. Having grown up in rural Australia amidst the largest brown coal deposit in the Southern Hemisphere, the industrial geography of the opencast mine influences all aspects of her creative practice, including material choices, the crafting of her objects and the historical and visual rhythms of her work.

5 October 2018 — 4 December 2018  |  See exhibition detail

2018 Portage Ceramic Awards

This year’s Portage Ceramic Awards was judged by American artist Bari Ziperstein. Ziperstein is at the forefront of a thriving ceramic scene in Los Angeles. Te Uru was pleased to announce local Henderson duo Sang-Sool Shim and Keum-Sun Lee as the Premier Award Winners in the 2018 Portage Ceramic Awards, for their piece, In the Beautiful Dream.

9 November 2018 — 10 February 2019  |  See exhibition detail

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS SOME GRAPHIC SEX, HEAVY DRINKING, BLOODY VIOLENCE, AND DIRTY LANGUAGE?

For this exhibition, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES presents an hour-long programme of nine works, including WA'AD, an 18-minute work about a Palestinian astronaut who lives on Mars with other astronauts. Across all of the works simmers the question of whether new human achievements actually improve the lot of humanity, or increase a growing sense of isolation and alienation.

1 December 2018 — 24 February 2019  |  See exhibition detail

Parallel Universe: The Art and Design of Roy Good

Parallel Universe: The Art and Design of Roy Good is an exhibition that celebrates the 50-year parallel careers of Roy Good as both a designer and painter. It draws attention to Good’s pioneering work for New Zealand television from the late 1960s, alongside his early forays into modernist abstract painting, as well as featuring paintings from the last decade – a highly productive period of renewed energy and innovation.

1 December 2018 — 10 February 2019  |  See exhibition detail

What the Whau?

In Te Uru's Small Space this summer, What the Whau? is a collaborative exhibition featuring work by the partners and resident jewellers of Whau Studios in Pt Chevalier. Ranging from fine jewellery to fashion to contemporary jewellery, these works represent the diversity in inspiration and approach found between the four walls of this jewellery collective’s shared studio space.

5 December 2018 — 6 February 2019  |  See exhibition detail

Bruce Barber and Mark Harvey: Button Action

Artists Bruce Barber and Mark Harvey revisit their performance collaboration, My Left is Your Right, performed earlier this year as part of the Free Hand performance series at Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

17 December 2018 — 17 December 2019  |  See exhibition detail

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