Brett Graham

Fred Graham

Ralph Hotere

Ronnie van Hout

Robert Jahnke

Colin McCahon

Ava Seymour

Gordon Walters

In the Valley

In October 2021 Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery was pleased to present eight important works from the Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection especially chosen for Whirinaki Whare Taonga as an opportunity for local audiences to see works by some of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading artists first hand. As a university gallery we are committed to helping audiences appreciate the history of art as it has unfolded in this country. Thus, we selected four works by leading artists of the modern period (1930–1970): Fred Graham, Ralph Hotere, Colin McCahon, and Gordon Walters, who are recognised for the ways they have responded to their surroundings and to their distinct but intertwined cultural inheritances, thus contributing to the evolution of modern art in ways that are uniquely of this place. To be ‘modern’ in their terms was to turn away from description, to find a formal and material language that gave new shape to ideas, beliefs and narratives, to tap a deep store of cultural symbols, and to convey convictions and hopes that mere pictures cannot capture.These four artists are juxtaposed with four works by artists of newer generations, who have grown up alongside and after their forebears. Brett Graham, Robert Jahnke, Ava Seymour and Ronnie van Hout are familiar with their history and choose to build upon it, to add to the conversation about those self-same beliefs and values, but now with a critical intention to expand and complicate what has come before them. They are exemplary of contemporary art: that is the art of our present.Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington’s Art Collection consists of more than 600 art works in all media, that have been collected since the 1940s for the benefit of staff, students and the wider public in the belief that art not only enhances the physical appearance of the campus but adds a creative dimension to the learning experience that allows other ways of knowing to co-exist alongside the rational and objective.

Joyce Campbell

On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the Work of Joyce Campbell

 was the first substantial presentation of artist Joyce Campbell’s photo- and media-based practice, first held at the Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery in 2019. The exhibition was originally developed in dialogue with the architecture of the Adam Art Gallery and was re-staged within Te Uru’s similarly unique gallery environment.

Rather than a conventional survey, the exhibition unfolds what the artist describes as "a meditation on the interdependence of physical systems." Curated by leading contemporary art historian, Los Angeles-based John C. Welchman, 

 examines a forcefield of relations Campbell has activated between photography, philosophy, ecology, material history, science fiction, and the care and reading of sacred and symbolic landscapes, that have evolved over the course of her near three-decade career.

Raised in Wairoa on the east coast of the North Island and now based in Auckland and Karekare, Campbell spent a decade in Los Angeles, Southern California. She is drawn to and has negotiated extreme conditions: the wild places of rural New Zealand; the desiccated, smog-choked hinterlands of California; the icy vastness of Antarctica; and the ocean’s coral reefs and imagined depths. Shifting scale from the microscopic to the global, she uses a wide spectrum of techniques from photography’s two-hundred-year history to give visible form to the beauty, complexity and sheer perseverance of life under threat.

Campbell’s preference for nineteenth-century techniques and analogue processes gives rise to images of extraordinary detail, depth, richness, and texture; but it also fulfils her ambition to depict subtle or ‘mysterious’ things and events that modern cameras and standardised equipment do not allow. She is interested, above all, in the interconnectedness of complex biological, spiritual, and representational systems. She believes in the potential of photography to resist the global techno-capitalist hegemony that underpins the exponential collapse of biodiversity and the decline of spirit and mutual understanding in the contemporary world.

Joyce Campbell (b. 1971, Wairoa) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Auckland New Zealand. She has an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland (1999), where she is now Associate Professor. She has lived in Karekare, in the Waitākere Ranges, as well as in Southern California where she studied, taught and worked. In 2006 she undertook an artist residency in Antarctica. Her recent work utilises anachronistic photographic techniques, such as the daguerreotype and ambrotype, as well as conventional analogue and digital photography, video, film and sculpture. She uses these to examine the collision of natural and cultural systems often in extreme environments. Her interests have led her to render visible microbial colonies, crystals in the process of formation, silver dispersing into colloidal suspension, the migration of glaciers into the ocean, distressed coral reefs and dead forests, river gorges in rural New Zealand and California’s desert washes and industrial brownfields. She has exhibited throughout New Zealand, and her works have been included in solo and group exhibitions in Australia and the U.S. She is represented by Two Rooms, Auckland, Bartley + Company Art, Wellington, and Nadene Milne Gallery, Arrowtown and Christchurch.

The exhibition was accompanied by a fully-illustrated 320-page publication

, co-published by Adam Art Gallery and Sternberg Press. The exhibition and publication were made possible with substantial support from the Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland, Chartwell Trust, Jenny Todd, and Bath Street Trust.

‘A way through’ – Colin McCahon’s Gate III

 has graced the walls of Victoria University of Wellington since 1972.

Thousands of students and staff have walked past it over these years and many remember their first encounter with the towering words ‘I AM’ that dominate its composition. Despite this being one of McCahon’s largest works, and one he envisaged as a cumulative statement of the themes and subjects that concerned him, it is surprising that the painting has never been included in any of McCahon’s survey exhibitions. Until 2019, the painting had only once left the campus, when in 1994 it was taken down the hill from Kelburn to an exhibition of the University’s art collection at City Gallery Wellington.

For the centenary of the artist’s birth last year, which coincided with Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi’s twentieth year as the University’s professional art gallery and guardian of its art collection, we put McCahon’s work into wider circulation. Our aim was to enable more, new and different audiences to encounter the painting in person and to ensure that the urgent message writ large on the artist’s massive canvas can be read by all who share his concerns for the shortcomings of humanity and his trust in our ability to do better.

We were excited to return the painting to one of the original 1971 

tour venues. This is the first time since then that the painting has been exhibited in the South Island Te Wai Pounamu. It is inspiring to think about this progressive moment in New Zealand’s art history when those freshly painted large-scale works were presented in the new purpose-built Canterbury Society of Arts building. We are pleased that 

 is once more seen in the city where McCahon lived and painted at a formative phase of his career (1948–53). To deepen understanding of this mammoth work, we bring together archival material that tells its story: why and for what it was made; how it found its way to the University in Wellington; and what was going through McCahon’s mind as he painted. This has been a revelation to us, filling in gaps in our knowledge and enriching our understanding of the culture he was working in that we have inherited.

As part of the Colin McCahon centenary year, McCahon’s epic 1970 mural, 

 made its first appearance in Auckland since it was originally commissioned for Auckland City Art Gallery’s 

 was painted in Auckland, drawing on a combination of west-coast views, rural landscapes and religious texts. It returns to the ‘I Am’ motif that he first painted while living in Titirangi in the 1950s and anticipates the grand works he would paint from his new studio in Muriwai. The painting is atypically large for art in 1970s’ Aotearoa, made possible through the Auckland City Art Gallery’s patronage. It is an urgent address to McCahon’s public. 

Implicit in the painting is McCahon’s acknowledged ambition to make a statement against the nuclear threat, a statement that would reach even the most sceptical viewer of modern art. Given humanity’s indefatigable and self-centred quest for power, this message still resonates today.

Immediately following the nationwide tour of 

 was purchased for the Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection. Since 1972 it has been on permanent public display at the University. 

Literally a ‘one painting’ exhibition, 

 offers three thematic entry points into McCahon’s work: addressing its material history as a commissioned artwork destined for a university collection; locating it within McCahon’s artistic output; and as a lens on the fraught socio-political times in which it was painted. These themes are drawn out in the accompanying archival material especially gathered for the occasion.

Co-curated by Director Christina Barton, Gallery Intern Nina Dyer, and Curator Collections Sophie Thorn.

Developed and toured by Te Pataka Toi Adam Art Gallery. Supported by Dame Jenny Gibbs.

Janet Bayly

Minerva Betts

Rhondda Bosworth

Jane Campion

Alexis Hunter

Joanna Margaret Paul

Popular Productions

Fragments of a World: Artists Working in Film and Photography 1973–1987

 was first staged at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery in 2015. It brought together a selection of films and photographs by Janet Bayly, Minerva Betts, Rhondda Bosworth, Jane Campion, Alexis Hunter, Joanna Margaret Paul and Popular Productions produced between 1973 and 1987. The exhibition borrowed its title from a book published in 1976 surveying the emerging contemporary art medium of photography, which took a gendered approach to its subject and featured the work of 31 women artists. The aim of the exhibition was to examine a particular form of image making that opens up thinking about the intersection of feminism, new technologies, and a disruptive epoch. The selected artists all demonstrate their embrace of and struggle with established conventions and hierarchies in the art, film and photographic worlds. Employing strategies such as staging, repetition, reconstruction, assemblage and blurring, they test new technologies, slipping between categories to reframe everyday experiences with disruptive purpose, yet avoiding overt politics. Experimenting with the new media of their time, these artists foreshadow how technologies now mediate our desires and inner thoughts; they are eloquent harbingers of our Instagram era.

Sandy Callister is an independent curator and writer based in Auckland. She was 2010 Research Scholar at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington and has been an Adam Art Gallery Advisory Board Member and Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection Trustee since 2010.