Work by Wayne Barrar is included in the exhibition In, on, over at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 28 May – 2 October 2022.

“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)

David L Pike has produced a fascinating new book in his ongoing investigation of the meanings of modern underground spaces – Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades (Oxford University Press, 2022).

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 is a group exhibition that utilises photography, moving image, poetry, sound and virtual space. It builds on the artists’ experience and observation of phenomena in relation to maritime surveying, sampling, and resource exploitation. It also considers the difference between day-to-day realities and expectations of maritime space and the versions we create through simulation, imagining and technologies – playing at the edges of science and ‘the real’ as we conventionally expect them to be.

Featuring work by Wayne Barrar, Mizuho Nishioka, Tane Moleta and Kerry Hines.

Forrester Gallery, Oamaru – 30 October 2021 to 7 February 2022.

… an upcoming panel discussion, 6-7:30 p.m. Thursday 15 April, Toi Poneke, Wellington. Details here: https://toiponeke.nz/events/2021/04/15/ecological-anxiety-and-photography.

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.