CHRISTCHURCH ART GALLERY

White on White 23 November 08 - October 09

Keeping younger audiences in mind, and including a number of new works by contemporary artists, this is an exhibition brimming with the imaginative possibilities of white

Gary Hill - Up Against Down - 23 May 09 – 23 August 09

Gary Hill is world-renowned for his bold experiments with moving images.In this exhibition, he explores the paradoxes and difficulties of the human attempt to communicate. The best known of the works on show, Wall piece, is a high-impact fusion of light, language and body language.

Rita Angus - Life & Vision 7 March 09 – 5 July 09

Rita Angus is widely regarded as one of the leading New Zealand artists of the twentieth century. Rita Angus: Life & Vision features 141 works drawn from public and private collections throughout New Zealand.

Miles - a life in architecture 7 March 09 – 14 June 09

Celebrating the achievements of leading New Zealand architect, Sir Miles Warren, this exhibition reveals his contribution to modernist architecture and his success as a watercolourist and gardener.

THE PHYSICS ROOM

The New Honesty: a critique of the Retreat 3 June 09 – 28 June 09

An exhibition orchestrated by the Wellington based artist g. bridle that collects and incorporates a range of objects and visual cues. Employing the form of the exhibition itself—as both a medium and conduit, the exhibition space operates as a type of sanctuary where the individual components merge to work in harmony. All the contributors have led their own lives, and the collection therefore reflects the idiosyncrasies of their individual tastes and personal trajectories.

Théâtre de Poche 3 June 09 – 28 June 09

Presenting its audience with the increasingly enigmatic figure of a magician who proceeds to conjure a series of images into the air. Explicating a cyclical tale, this playful meditation by the French-born, Dublin-based artist Aurélien Froment sees stills from cinema history slowly shuffled and hieroglyphs nestle alongside natural wonders, challenging notions of the arrangement and precedence of images and all that they evoke.

CREATIVE NZ

Carey Best & Mirela Streza - Even The Trash 4 May 09 - 26 June 09

THE KIOSK

Simon Lawrence - God of fibre optic roll-out - 5 June 09 – 2 July 09

ARTHOUSE

Bing Dawe - Vagrants Stragglers and the Unloved - 3 June 09 - 21 June 09

COCA

Linda James - 'Love Story / Precious Lives II'- 10th June 09 – 27th June 09

Paul Chapman - 'A Clinical Practice'- 10th June 09 – 28th June 09

Lee Brogan, Crystal Chain Gang, Rachel Ravenscroft, Colleen Ryan Priest & Di Tocker - 'Verre' - 10th June 09 – 28th June 09

Stone Maka - 'Faka'Ahu - Contemporary Fumage'10th June 09 – 27th June 09
Tongan –born artist, Stone Maka, has been based in Christchurch since 2005 and is currently the McMillan Brown Pacific Artist in Residence. His work establishes connections between the traditional bark cloth painting of ngatu ‘uli in Tonga and the formalism of European modernism. The artist maintained that ngatu ‘uli is the most ancient form of art making in the Pacific region, being practiced before the arrival of the first missionaries from America. The artist has said of his work: ‘I look at my smoke painting work, and I see beauty and harmony, even though the quality of smoke is still a mystery to many of us…. I've drawn smoke from fire to paint my canvas, I've drawn on motifs etc from the Black Tapa to create using smoke.’