A Busy Weekend at The Transitional Cathedral in Christchurch

Jane Zuster  - Collaged photographs of living rooms with missing walls revealing quake sites  http://www.newzealandpainting.co.nz/2012/04/christchurch-art-after-the-quakes/ Jane has hand sewn the photographs together in banners, one under each other (see attached images).

Also Wooden carvings/ taonga pūoro by Rua Pick, https://www.facebook.com/artistruapick/ and large canvases by Michael Armstrong http://www.mikesart.co.nz/

Additional about Jane Zusters’ works, as in the images.

Conventional divisions are in collapse as a result of the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. Structure has completely disappeared in this series of digital photographs, capturing an overwhelming sense of displacement and impermanence. Interior scenes range from the abandoned to the familiarly kitsch, each one existing within realities of tragedy, upheaval, and disaster. ‘Home’ offers no sanctuary for unseen occupants in these confronting juxtapositions, which describe the persistence of routine in the face of cataclysm. Zusters conveys ‘a tangible sense of despair, but also a circularity and remembrance that things pass and will return again …

Jane finds a point of difference in her series, At Home in Christchurch, by lifting a trick from English artist Richard Hamilton’s famous 1956 pop art collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? She depicts relatively ordered Christchurch domestic interiors, but replaces one of the walls with an external view of the debris and chaos caused by the Big Shakes. The effect is to communicate something of what it’s like to live in the midst of a natural disaster. Life goes on, even if your walls are shaken down and world has vanished, but it will be a changed beyond recognition. Welcome to the new ‘normal’.

About all three artists:

JANE ZUSTERS

The world is the subject of my art. What happens in the studio reflects what is going on outside of it and what I am thinking about at the time. I have been working in this way for four decades now. I have worked across a range of media including printmaking, video, installation, photography, and painting. My practice has never been confined to one particular process or technique; adopting this pragmatic approach has allowed me to pick and choose the most effective visual and semiotic tools to convey my messages. My early work often explored the sociology of gender and sexuality. My recent work explores through both painting and photography the effects we have on the environment and since the Christchurch Earthquakes the effects of nature on us. I am happy to have this opportunity to show my project Where the home is - The Christchurch Earthquakes 2010-2012. I was very affected by the February 22, 2011 Christchurch earthquake and this was my response. These rearranged rooms contain tantalizing glimpses of ruined public spaces. The ecological entanglement of these reassembled realities reminds us that the occupants of these rooms have seen their city shaken to bits.

MIKE ARMSTRONG

Mike Armstrong is an award-winning painter and sculptor. He was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow of 1984 and has worked as an exhibiting artist for forty-five years, exhibiting nationally and internationally, and his drawings, paintings, printmaking and sculpture is well represented in significant national art collections. 

Recent paintings use abstraction and representational drawing together in paint. Images are drawn into and over abstract layers of colour. 

Colour and humour, politics and social commentary dominate Armstrong’s current work. A competent and expressive painter, he carefully crafts layers of meaning into drawn scenes, forming a dialogue of ideas. These are representational images are interwoven with layers of gestural paint and textured surfaces.

On one level these current paintings are metaphors for western culture, capitalism and industry seemingly hell bent on self-destruction; a civilization run its course, exhausted, pulling itself apart. Our culture of western expansion, economic domination and exploitation at its limit, as nature reacts through global climate change. These paintings are a quiet political protest in a world of business-driven consumerism, economic models, corporatization and centralized hegemonies. Beyond the critique in these paintings there exist other levels; the collective unconscious in the dream of the wave. 

These are also paintings about not wanting to see, as determination to keep an unsustainable lifestyle blinds us to our need for action in the face of the reality of the developing collapse of the global environment.


RUA PICK

Kia ora koutou. From 1995 - 2011 we set up a Studio Gallery called Toko Mata ~ The Visionary Post in central Christchurch. This was a very creative, innovative and prolific period in my art, creating mostly mixed media painting. Toko Mata Studio Gallery was damaged during the Sept 4th 2010 earthquake and the February 22nd 2011 quake finished that creative space off. I lost all my gallery infrastructure, art making tools and supplies, yet managed to relocate many of the artworks between the quakes. 

My journey into carving began with the commission of a Pou dedicated to Rongo Marae Roa ~ Elemental of Peace. 2011 to the present I have taken up Whakairo ~ wood, bone, and stone carving, especially Taonga Puoro ~ Traditional sound instruments at my new studio Ko Te Atarangi Puawananga i runga i te mata o te Ra kapakapa kura ~ The flower of knowledge silhouetted on the face of the beating red sun.
This taonga before you shows the new direction my art has travelled towards since Ruaimokoroa the Keeper of the Fire Mountains and Earthquakes, changed my direction from a painted one into one of sounds and forms, shaped from natural materials.

***Rongo Aio ki a koutou katoa