Past projects

Standing still, still standing

Artist: Deanna Dowling
Graphic Design: Mike Peters
Photographer: Ted Whitaker

23 October 2021 – 24 January 2022

Standing still, still standing, uses photographic documentation, archival imagery and text to explore modern architectural value systems. Pōneke-based artist Deanna Dowling’s new light box exhibition reflects on the history and future of the well-known and highly debated Gordon Wilson Flats located on The Terrace in Pōneke Wellington. Through a process of extracting and editing small excerpts of text from articles discussing the situation this building find itself in, Dowling’s poetic text and image works invites viewers to consider the relationships between people, place and structure.

In a city where land is precious and housing is limited, has the building become a symbol of the problems the city faces? And what will win: preservation or progress?

Designed by Gordon Wilson and his team within the Ministry of Works Architectural Section and built between 1957–1959, the Gordon Wilson Flats embody modernist design thinking in Aotearoa New Zealand. This building is one of two remaining modernist and brutalist high density social housing structures, built under a post-war government. With few alterations ever made to the exterior of the building, the integrity and form of the mid-century design has never been compromised.

An architectural artifact, slowly becoming a modernist ruin, this structure and the smaller, neighbouring, McLean Flats exist in a form of stasis. Vacant since their closure in 2012 due to structural safety concerns, the site was sold to Victoria University of Wellington in 2014 for six million dollars. Perched below the university and caught in “The battle over Wellington’s ugliest building”; between those who fight to preserve this symbol of innovative social housing and those who render it useless. Victoria University intends to demolish it.

About the artist

Deanna Dowling holds an MFA from Massey University. Recent exhibitions include: Notes on time, Gus Fisher Gallery Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2021); Hold, RM Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (2020); The crab and the rock, Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei (2019); SOLO, The Dowse Art Museum, Te Awakairangi Lower Hutt (2018) and The sea we built on, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Ōtepoti Dunedin (2016). Deanna was a recipient of an Asia New Zealand Foundation residency at Youkobo Art Space in 2016, and the winner of the National Contemporary Art Award awarded by Waikato Museum in 2014.

Whakahoki

Artist: Keri-Mei Zagrobelna
Photographer and Digital Artist: Norm Heke
Curator: Awhina Tamarapa

18 June – 26 September 2021

Te Whanganui-a-Tara based artist Keri-Mei Zagrobelna’s new exhibition Whakahoki draws inspiration from the Maramataka Māori Lunar calendar to celebrate Matariki in the Courtenay Place Park light boxes.

In Whakahoki, Zagrobelna considers how working within Te Ao Māori can bring balance and meaning to our lives, with a particular focus on mental health. The artist looks at how the Maramataka’s cycles through darkness and light can offer guidance on navigating similar phases in our own lives.

Zagrobelna has created contemporary jewellery and object art to interpret sixteen of the thirty lunar nights from the Maramataka. She uses a diverse array of materials in her handcrafted pieces including obsidian, shells, kowhai seeds, glass and pounamu. The unique objects have been translated into a series of striking light box images with photography by Norm Heke. Zagrobelna and Heke worked closely together to create digital imagery that captures the essence and kaupapa for each of the corresponding Maramataka nights. The imagery pulls viewers into the space of the Maramataka, providing an opportunity to interpret the night’s meaning and relevance. The title Whakahoki refers to Zagrobelna’s engagement with the Maramataka as a way to ‘return, respond and give back’. She hopes the exhibition will prompt audiences to consider the relevance of indigenous knowledge to contemporary life.

About the artists

Keri-Mei Zagrobelna (Te Āti-Awa, Te Whānau a Apanui) is an emerging contemporary Māori artist who seeks to build cross-cultural understanding and relationships through her work. Zagrobelna has exhibited and presented her work nationally and internationally including as part of the 12th Festival of Pacific Arts New Zealand delegation in Guam (2016) and at Crypt Gallery, London (2018).

Ho Sun Nian 賀新年

Artists: Kerry Ann Lee 鄺南燕, Stan Chan 仕丹 陳
Curator: Asian Events Trust 

1 February – 23 May 2021

Ho Sun Nian is inspired by Wellington’s Chinese New Year celebrations and community. Wellington-based Chinese artists Stan Chan and Kerry Ann Lee respond to the annual celebration by bringing their unique perspectives and expressions of Chinese culture to Courtenay Place.

New Year is the most important date in the Chinese calendar. The exhibition’s title Ho Sun Nian refers to the Cantonese phrase ‘celebrating New Year’ and references the language of the Chinese community who first settled in Wellington. The community’s new year festivals created an opportunity for new Chinese residents to bring their culture out into the streets of Wellington, and to feel more at home in New Zealand.

Chinese brush painter and calligrapher Stan Chan has been involved with the new year festival for 20 years. In Ho Sun Nian, his Chinese brush paintings capture moments from photographs of Wellington’s Chinese New Year celebrations in years gone by – a Chinese lion parading through the streets, an East meets West fashion show from the 1980s.  Chan’s expressive paintings portray the lively atmosphere of the cultural events.

Kerry Ann Lee shows a personal perspective of Chinese culture and celebrations. Her work has been described as exploring cultural intersections in the space between private moments and public locations. Well known for her hand-made and digital collages, Lee’s new work in the light boxes also overlays a playful ‘pop’ aesthetic to scenes of remembrance and celebration. Fascinated by the role food and ritual plays in bringing communities together, Lee shows Cantonese Chinese placemaking in all its guises from family meals, restaurants and local sites of significance.  

Ho Sun Nian is part of the 20th anniversary of Chinese New Year festival celebrations, 13-14 February 2021.

About the artists

Stan Chan has practised and taught traditional Chinese brush painting and calligraphy, as well as western oil and watercolour techniques from his studio inkLink in Left Bank, Cuba Mall, Wellington since 2000. Chan studied art in Hong Kong and has participated in both group and solo exhibitions throughout New Zealand.

Kerry Ann Lee is a visual artist, designer, and scholar from Te Whanganui-a-tara of Seypi Cantonese Chinese descent. Lee has undertaken international residencies in China, Taiwan, US, Mexico and Australia and exhibits regularly in New Zealand and overseas. Exhibitions include, Fruits in the Backwater at Pātaka Art + Museum (2017) and Return to Skyland (2018), an installation within the Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality exhibition at Te Papa. 

To Turn Night Into Day

Courtenay Place Park Light Boxes
Martin Awa Clarke Langdon

27 May – 27 September

Wellington-based, Auckland-born artist Martin Awa Clarke Langdon (Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Whāwhākia, Ngāti Hikairo, Kāi Tahu) presents a new photographic series in the Courtenay Place Park Light Boxes for the months leading into and through Matariki 2020, Pipiri – Whiringa-ā-nuku.

Langdon plays on the transient and changeable nature of this site, allowing passers-by to observe and interact with his artwork during the day and night. The exhibition consciously embraces the constant state of natural change from Pipiri to Whiringa-ā-nuku.

To Turn Night Into Day observes Matariki as a time of reflection, realignment and reconnection for all. Langdon’s visual imagery explores duality and connections within the culturally entangled Māori and Pākehā worldviews he experienced growing up. Personal moments with whānau, urban observations and abstractions of whakapapa highlight the importance of whānau and shared knowledge through the generations.

Selection of light box images from To Turn Night Into Day:

• Martin Awa Clarke Langdon, Marama
• Martin Awa Clarke Langdon, Growth Chart
• Martin Awa Clarke Langdon, Height Check

If these walls could talk, they'd tell you my name

Courtenay Place Park Light Boxes
Jasmine Togo-Brisby

16 December 2019 – May 2020

Wellington-based, South Sea Islander artist Jasmine Togo-Brisby presents a new photographic series in the Courtenay Place Park Lightboxes – titled, If these walls could talk, they'd tell you my name.

This new body of work responds to two concurrent events; the artist's recent discovery of records confirming her great-great-grandparents' existence as house slaves, acquired in 1899 by the Sydney-based Wunderlich family, and the current restoration of the Wunderlich ceiling panels in Wellington's Town Hall. 

The photographic series continues Togo-Brisby's interest in histories of the Pacific Slave Trade embedded within contemporary material culture. Wunderlich ceiling panels, distinctive for their ornate pressed designs, can be found across many buildings across Australia and Aotearoa and are now carefully preserved as heritage materials. 

The overly visible Wunderlich family legacy bears remarkable contrast to paucity of historical records available for South Sea Islanders. Across Togo-Brisby's photographs, inter-generational portraits force a consideration of who is and isn't visible within the archives and narratives of history.

Essay about this work by Ioana Gordon-Smith (23KB PDF)

Lost in the air

Courtenay Place Park Light Boxes
Ana Iti, Ellyse Randrup, Gregory Kan and Sarah Maxey
Curated by Chloe Geoghegan

10 June 2019 – 2 September 2019

Four local and independent artists with complex, new and enduring relationships to Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington have collaborated to create two encounters or readings of the urban nature of Te Aro, central city Wellington.

Chloe Geoghegan asked these four creative practitioners to collaborate, creating dual readings of the city, and new ways for Wellingtonians to navigate the creative fabric of the city. Ana Iti often brings text into her work as a visual artist to explore narrative. For one side of the light boxes, she tells the story of Waimapihi, a bubbling stream / awa buried below Wellington — lost but not forgotten. Currently based in Europe, young Wellington designer Ellyse Randrup delicately illuminates this story with a new typeface based on Iti's text. She imagines this text being gradually etched away under the street surface as a misty memory of the stream.

On the other side of the lightboxes, Gregory Kan's prose about Wellington emotively captures this complicated, bustling and populated urban environment. Kan's text imagines people passing each other by on the street, the wind whipping up around them, capturing their many thoughts and feelings, to be lost in the air and in the moment. Designer Sarah Maxey overlays Kan's texts on her photographic interventions - cyanotypes taken just around the corner on Cuba Street, illustrating a place for Kan's words to live within.

Iti, Randrup, Kan, and Maxey find ways to seek and disrupt moments of ambiguity and familiarity through the minutiae of life, bringing these imaginative, everyday and random encounters of the street to reveal the city's own graphic language.

Te Māra Tautāne

Angela Kilford
10 June 2019 – 2 September 2019

In Māori cosmology, the rising of the Matariki constellation, and the star Puanga, marks the beginning of the new year. Artist and textile designer Angela Kilford's (Te Whanau A Kai, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu) exhibition Te Māra Tautāne explores and celebrates invisible whakapapa connections between the earthly and celestial realms at Matariki.

Photographing and manipulating images of Aotearoa New Zealand's natural environment; flower blossoms, tree bark, and tuatara skin, the artist seeks to express the ecosystems and multiple ancestries these living beings share. Tangaroa ā mua, the first moon phase of Matariki, is depicted by the small white flowers of the Ngaio tree, evoking the whakapapa story of Rona and the moon, where Rona is plucked from earth, and taken to the moon whilst holding onto a Ngaio tree. 

Kilford sees these lightbox images as a contemporary urban māra tautāne, which is a traditional, ceremonial garden, planted in offering to Matariki.

Greywacke Love Poems

Raewyn Martyn
8 April 2019 – 9 June 2019

Wellington artist Raewyn Martyn explores processes of transformation within human-made forms and geological landscapes. Greywacke Love Poems have developed through experimentation with mineral pigments, plant-based polymers and photography, re-positioning Wellington's South Coast in the city's urban centre.

A Place TŪ Be

Chevron Hassett
17 December 2018 – 24 March 2019

As Aotearoa’s population becomes more diverse, the concept of cultural identity also shifts and evolves. Chevron Hassett’s exhibition in the Courtenay Place Park Lightboxes presents large-scale portraits of his peers, young urban Māori as digital pouwhenua, situating them within the heart of the city they live in, and creating a temporary public marae ātea in Courtenay Place.

Chevron Hassett graduated with a Bachelor of Design with Honours from Massey University in 2017, winning the Creative New Zealand Te Waka Toi award – Ngā Manu Pīrere in the same year. He has worked on a variety of community projects with the Hutt City Council and was awarded the Hutt City Certificate of Achievement for Art in 2017. Most recently, his work was included in the group show Nowhere to Somewhere at Paul Nache Gallery, Gisborne. In 2019, his solo exhibition The Children of Māui will show at artist-run space Meanwhile and at Wharewaka in Wellington.

Visit Chevron's website for more information.

Garden of Purity

Laura Duffy
31 August - 9 December 2018

Garden of Purity considers how we read and ingest imagery, drawing links through history from art history to advertising. Duffy sees the works as being a layered conversation about Catholicism, advertising, abjection, and queerness. She uses edible materials as a starting point for the series of digitally manipulated photographs in the light boxes and online video works. The series intends to prompt questions about traditional notions of beauty and divinity by blurring the lines between repulsion and desire.

Whetū Whitu

Matthew McIntyre Wilson (Taranaki, Ngā Māhanga and Titahi)
1 June - 20 August

Tērā Matariki ka rewa i te pae
Nau mai, haramai te hua o te tau hou…

Whetū Whitu is a series of  brooches that reflect the stories of Puanga and Matariki. The brooches are part of McIntyre Wilson’s ongoing Price of Change Series which feature re-purposed imagery cut from New Zealand, Cook Island and British coins. Brooches are normally pinned to the wearer, but for this exhibition they adorned light boxes as large-scale prints.

Find out more in Nikki Hessell’s essay on Whetū Whitu (612KB PDF)

New nightclub for Courtenay Place

Susana Torre and Raphaela Rose
1 August 2017 – 26 January 2018

Collaborative arts duo Lightreading worked with architects Susana Torre and Raphaela Rose to design a fictitious, new, and socially progressive nightclub complex for Courtenay Place.Their designs are based on interviews with a range of women who’ve helped shape Wellington’s nightlife over the past 50 years.

New nightclub interviews (507KB PDF) - This document contains content that may offend.

Magical Māori Mystery Tour of Wellington

Designed by: Johnson Witehira and Kemi Niko
Curated by: Tina Makereti
Written by: Debbie Broughton and guests

1 April – 30 July 2018

This textual light box project engages elements of poetry, pastiche and parody to both explore a personal history of Wellington and critique the way Māori histories are represented.

From the Aether

7 April–31 July 2016
Curator: Caroline McQuarrie

From the Aether showcased Wellington artists whose interest in amateur science was brought together into a ‘cabinet of curiosities’. From the Aether featured artists: Jonathan Kay, Shaun Matthews and Bonny Stewart-MacDonald. The exhibition's aim was to celebrate exploring the world around us through easily accessible science.

The Colour of Courtenay Place

7 April–31 July 2015
Artist: Gary Peters

As colour perception had its 15 minutes of internet fame with that dress, artist Gary Peters launched The Colour of Courtenay Place – a series of 16 bold, urban monochrome works, which encouraged us to look more closely at the space and colour around us.

Unlike that dress, there was no confusing the colours in Wellington’s Courtenay Place.

The Colour of Courtenay Place was the first large-scale public artwork for Peters, taking his colourful work out of the studios and galleries and onto the streets.

Peters encouraged us to look again at our environment, to pause for a moment and notice the details we normally overlook. These slabs of colour, devoid of text and advertising, offered us a visual pause in the busyness of the strip, and invited us to take a moment and be curious about looking at the space we inhabit.

Huts of Welling Town

5 December–29 March 2015
Artist: Kemi Niko & Co.

Artists Kemi & Niko brought everything you love about the backcountry to Courtenay Place.

In tandem with their project Miniature Hikes, these light boxes acted like photographic portals to seven magical miniature huts located across Wellington's diverse backyard.

Hidden in the bush, at the beach and on windy summits, these individually themed, colourful, and interactive miniatures celebrate the honesty and unexpected comfort of the backcountry hut.

Teasing out a love of summer adventure, an intricately hand-drawn map also provides curious passersby with the hut’s locations.

It's love, isn't it?

29 August–30 November 2014
Artist: Sarah Jane Parton (curated by Jessica Scott)

Prominent multimedia artist and writer Sarah Jane Parton’s art work, It’s love, isn’t it? explores the quest for love on Courtenay Place. A series of works that combine images and text, Sarah’s work takes its name from the title of a book of love poems by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell and Meg Campbell.

The visual references for the exhibition came from posters made in the 1980s and 90s, the journey between the moments when her birth parents met in the Courtenay Place McDonald’s when they were 16; and when Sarah started to think about love as sex. Sarah has worked with 15 writers, photographer Matt Grace and graphic designer Alice Clifford.

Together they have created a love story inspired by the possibilities of the inner-city location of the light boxes, and have drawn on the associations of Courtenay Place as a site of potential meetings and the fruitless pursuit of love.

The Land of Tara

10 April –3 August 2014
Artist: Johnson Witehira

Designer and artist Johnson Witehira presents a new and bold series of digital portraits in his light box exhibition The Land of Tara. Standing in each light box are Witehira’s graphic representations of ancestors such as Kupe, Whatonga, and his sons Tautoki and Tara (after whom Wellington harbour, Te-Whanganui-a Tara, is named).

Acting like pou-tāhuhu support pillars found in wharenui, the depicted artworks transformed Courtenay Place Park into a meeting place suggestive of a Marae. Striking and highly visible to Wellingtonians during the city’s Matariki festival, this exhibition further developed the artist’s exploration of Māori and Pacific designs in a contemporary context.

Local Coordinates

10 August–3 December 2012
Artist: Molly Samsell (curated by Andrea Bell)

Local Coordinates is a series of photographic images by Molly Samsell. These images present a composite of surfaces - from exterior brick walls to decorative interior features. Photographic moments of stillness are presented in contrast to the dynamic urban movement in Courtenay Place, creating a space that disrupts the pace of the everyday.

• Local Coordinates (322KB PDF)

Imaginary Geographies

8 December–2 April 2012
Artists: Elaine Campaner (Australia), Alex Dorfsman (Mexico), Jae Hoon Lee (Korea), Kerry Ann Lee (Dunedin), Brian Samuels (Wellington), Gemma Syme (Wellington) and Kate Woods (Wellington)
Curator: Claudia Arozqueta

Artists from New Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Korea draw on real and imagined landscapes to encourage passers-by to take a fresh look at public space.

Pilgrimage

20 August–5 December 2011
Artists: Andy Palmer and David Boyce (curated by Andy Palmer)

Pilgrimage is a collaborative exhibition by photographers Andy Palmer and David Boyce, which explores the essence of rugby and sporting culture in New Zealand.

The photographers move beyond the game itself, to look at the ways rugby permeates our lives, landscapes and national identity.

• Curatorial Statement (105Kb PDF) | Text version (5Kb RTF)