Window Gallery/2010
Night Cities
17 December 2010 - 26 January 2011
In comparison with the daytime, the city at night entails dramatic changes in visibility, movement, rhythm, activity, inhabitation and light. Yet our 'night cities' are rarely considered as a topic of architectural investigation. The Night City studio project, run in the first year of the Master of Architecture (Professional) degree this year at Unitec, offered twelve students an opportunity to approach architectural design through research into lighting conditions found on their chosen site. Students focused on Karangahape Road, as its environs support a unique, active nightlife and contain a variety of urban morphologies and lighting conditions.
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Lisa Walker
06 November 2010 - 15 December 2010
This installation presents a selection of recent neck pieces by Lisa Walker, each of which utilises a range of materials from New Zealand collected by Walker when she returned home from Munich last December after 14 years abroad. The construction of the neck pieces resembles that of contemporary Polynesian lei, where the designs frequently draw upon found materials, both natural and manufactured, in bright colours and textures. Walker's works also refer to developments in contemporary international jewellery as well as to the 'Bone Stone Shell' jewellery movement that emerged in New Zealand in the 1980's.
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Shore Party
01 October 2010 - 03 November 2010
Philippa Durkin's ceramic works featured in 'Shore Party' pay homage to the early Antarctic explorers. She writes, "there is an ever growing interest and canonization of anything and anybody connected to Antarctica. The continent looms large in the New Zealand psyche. After spending seven months conserving the heroic huts of Shackleton and Scott, I have an intimate connection with the objects."
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Drapes for Real Men
03 September 2010 - 29 September 2010
Drapes for Real Men references the traditions of textile and its functional and domestic associations, utilising printing to embellish the textile surface. The resulting textiles celebrate the handmade product but with an agenda, the content undermining the traditional expectations of what is pattern and the adornment of a domestic retreat. In this case every real man's home is his bunker.
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Okoshi-ezu: Unfolding the New Japanese Architecture
06 August 2010 - 01 September 2010
This exhibition employs the ancient okoshi-ezu technique to represent certain streams of development in contemporary Japanese architecture. A number of contemporary architects are producing projects in which the realised buildings resemble okoshi-ezu models. As these architects have sought to reintegrate the elements of structure, spatial division, and envelope that modernist dogma separated, they have created architecture that is highly conducive to being modelled - and understood - using the thin, surface-oriented okoshi-ezu technique.
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Mathew McConnell: Chapter Three: Sleights of Hand
09 July 2010 - 04 August 2010
Encountering Mathew McConnell's installation Chapter Three: Sleights of Hand, it is hard not to feel that there's a whole lot of winking and nudging going down and not all of it is in the best of taste. Concepts explored by McConnell include displacement and transformation. These ideas, filtered through McConnell's peculiar meditations on 'thingness' and 'objecthood' remind one that his type of approach hasn't had a lot of airtime in the context of local craft practice.
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Simon Gamble: Piix
10 June 2010 - 07 July 2010
Piix is a new series of conceptual furniture objects by Simon Gamble, who considers digitally controlled cutting machinery as holding "dormant potential for crafting unique objects." He observes that digitally controlled cutting is becoming more and more commonplace in manufacture and that its use "allows for outputs from the virtual to the physical world." Employing an innovative creative approach that differs radically from the mundane tasks these machines are typically used for, Piix unlocks the latent potential for crafting bespoke objects using CNC (computer numerically controlled) milling.
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Humming on a windless slope
06 May 2010 - 09 June 2010
