“The artworks on display here offer different ways to think about the decisions or actions involved in exploring abstract concepts. Attention given to frames, margins, intersections, and edges offer ways to think through how one thing sits within another. Architecture and the built environment emerge both as materials and subject matter, while stacking and layering creates relationships, junctions, and potentials to exploit” (DPAG exhibition page)
New publication
Pike and Barrar travelled together researching Albanian bunker histories in 2011 and the book includes one of Barrar’s associated images, together with an earlier image from his project An Expanding Subterra.
For more information on Pike’s book, see here.
Maritime–trace–exposure at Forrester Gallery
Featuring work by Wayne Barrar, Mizuho Nishioka, Tane Moleta and Kerry Hines.
Forrester Gallery, Oamaru – 30 October 2021 to 7 February 2022.
Ecological anxiety and photography
An Architecture of the Sea
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:
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* 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 at Page Galleries
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.
New Works at Milford Galleries
New Zealand Art at Te Papa
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.
Strangers
SCAPE and talk
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.

Courtesy of SCAPE Public Art