An Architecture of the Sea – including work by Mizuho Nishioka, Tane Moleta, Wayne Barrar and Kerry Hines – is part of the Ars Electronica Festival for Art, Technology & Society, which is being held online 9-13 September 2020.

The festival, titled In Kepler’s Gardens, features around 120 sites around the world. An Architecture of the Sea is part of Garden Aotearoa New Zealand.

An Architecture of the Sea is an exhibition in an immersive virtual environment. Curated by Tane Moleta, it features:

* Kerry Hines – written text and audio works from an untitled series-in-progress of poems centred on close looking, which take maritime Wellington as their starting point.
* Mizuho Nishioka – works from an in-progress series titled Cadastral Recordings, which explore geography, the medium of photography and the temporality of the sea. The works employ traditional observational fieldwork, physical sampling, streaming data-sets, physical computing and photography.
* Wayne Barrar – works from two series. The Geography and Geometry of Salt utilises digital moving image photomicrography to visualise the return of salt samples sourced from mining operations (in New Zealand, USA, Australia and Spain) to their liquid lineage of the sea. The second series of digital photomicrographs, The Scale of the Surface, randomises collected and varied fish scales sampled from Wellington fishing trips with the ‘simulated’ surface of commercial artificial fishing lures.

To view the exhibition after 13 September, go to the permanent archived link here. Note: runs best via Firefox.

Paired Topographics features a selection of Wayne Barrar’s projects from 1985 to the present, using the concept of the topographic to pair works in both classic and unconventional ways.

Barrar’s earlier work emerged out of an interest in visualising and thinking about the human-modified landscape, referencing historical topographic photography and the influential American contemporary exhibition New Topographics. While his more recent projects have engaged with nature at other levels, including via issues such as biotechnology and within the realms of science, the topographic has been an ongoing interest in his work.

Paired Topographics runs at Page Galleries (42 Victoria Street, Wellington) from 13 February to 7 March 2020.

For more info, see pagegalleries.co.nz.

Five photographs from a new project, The Crystal Darkroom, are being shown at Milford Galleries Queenstown from 11 May through 18 June 2019.

View from eroded cliff face to Palliser Bay, Wairarapa 2006 is one of the collection items discussed in New Zealand Art at Te Papa, a major new book published this month by Te Papa Press.

Edited by Mark Stocker, the book features around 270 artworks from Te Papa’s collection, with accompanying short essays by a range of writers. It’s available from bookshops, and from Te Papa’s online store.

Work from the series An Expanding Subterra is included in Strangers, an exhibition on show at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery to 26 August 2018. Curated by James Hope, the exhibition “explores feelings of eeriness and unease, focusing on the figurative as the origin of these states.”

In/Visible Landscapes – a suite of works from The Glass Archive – is part of SCAPE Public Art, Christchurch, 7 October-18 November 2017. The work includes a series of billboards in Hagley Park, and banner works and prints at Canterbury Museum.

Wayne will give an artist’s talk on The Glass Archive at 11am, Sunday 12 November, the Bird Hall, Canterbury Museum – further background available here.

Work will be included in two new group exhibitions opening later this month: Where the River Bends at the Ilam Campus Gallery, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 15 August to 7 September; and Interior Worlds at the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, 19 August to 19 November.

A review by David Eggleton of the recent exhibition The Glass Archive, Hocken Gallery (Dunedin), can be found in Art New Zealand, Winter 2017 (no. 162). The project publication was also reviewed by John Hurrell for EyeContact and appears online here. Both provide interesting and informative commentary on this project.