Gabrielle McKone is best known for a daily photo blog that she maintained continuously for eleven years. This film work is an archive of the images and runs to four hours. 
Images:  Gabrielle McKone.
Music:   Composed and Mixed by Casey Greive and Conor Greive.
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Gabrielle McKone has had solo exhibitions at Photospace Gallery in 2003, 2005, and 2012. 
In 2009, James Gilberd curated an exhibition of Gabrielle McKone's street photographs for the Courtenay Place Lightboxes, entitled 'Three Stories Up', comprising 16 vertical triptychs. 
Gabrielle's photo-a-day project is one of NZ's longest running, and can be viewed on gabriellemckone.com
Follow GabrielleMcKone on Instagram
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'Going Electric' is Grant Douglas' fifth solo exhibition at Photospace Gallery, his first fully in colour and working digitally. His previous solo exhibitions in 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2013 featured close-up photographs taken on black & white film, sometimes hand-coloured with oil paints, but always eschewing the representation of the object photographed in any easily recognisable way.

Grant says: I began using a digital camera as a reaction to being without a darkroom, having an adverse reaction to the chemicals used and my old camera developing problems.  I assumed that I would use the digital camera in the same way that I had used my film camera, but when I saw the screen light up on the new digital, a switch was thrown in my brain, and I ‘fell for colour’.  The subject matter remains similar to previous work.  My digital skills at the moment are very limited but they are enough to hopefully enhance what I see, and the work is based in the real world, not one of fantasy, with roughly no more adjustments than could be achieved in the darkroom.

'Going Electric' opens at 12 noon on Sunday 29th August, 2021, in gallery rooms 3 and 4 of Photospace Gallery, 1st floor 37 Courtenay Place, Wellington. In gallery room 1 we have an exhibition of photographs taken by Brian de Montalk on a protest march against the Springbok rugby tour on NZ, in Wellington on 29th August 1981 - 40 years ago to the day. 'A Nation Divided' is an exhibition by Photography Aotearoa and hosted by Photospace Gallery.

Both exhibitions run until 9th October, 2021. 
Gallery hours are 10am-3pm Monday to Friday, 11am-2pm Saturdays, closed Sundays and public holidays.
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Communicating Vessels - artist statement
 
The word ‘unseen’ means to exist through a shroud of mystery and obscurity. The work of Surrealist and Occultist Ithell Colquhoun represents the unseen due to her preoccupation with the realms of the mental and spiritual. This is most evident within her occult practice (the word literally meaning ‘hidden’), as well as themes in her practice regarding communication of divine wisdom and earthly connection. Colquhoun was defiant and idealistic in her work and life; largely removing her from Surrealist dialogue. However, she is being rediscovered by contemporary audiences and newly observed through a feminist, surrealist and abstract paradigm.

Hayley Theyers was especially drawn to La Cathedrale Engloutie and with a meditative, dreamlike approach, explored its landscapes, contemplated its ruins and followed its runes. Working with water as a visual device allowed her to create the flowing, dreamlike tableaux commonly found within her practice. Hayley’s process is intuitive and open to transformation in post-production; much the same way a painter composes an artwork. She explores the unseen by depicting dream-states in literal form; that murky haze upon which we awake and remember moments of half-forgotten reveries. Hayley states ‘I found myself inside the island, floating to infinity and engulfed by the liquid medium of dreams.’

Colquhoun’s work is vocal of her reverence for the female experience. A woman’s thighs in bath water are at once cliff faces in the ocean and the mythological being Scylla. An abstract painting with a cavernous hole is the anatomy of a tree and the anatomy of the female body. Kate Rampling was immediately drawn to the way in which Colquhoun views the female body in relationship to the earth; they are one and the same, interchangeable and often unrecognisable from the other. Kate explored this through the female body mimicking the natural landscape, interacting with it and simply being present within it, in quiet moments of communion. She has reinterpreted Colquhoun’s abstract work into something identifiable, however, not completely without the element of chance, using automatism upon the photo negative surface.

In the later part of her life Ithell moved increasingly further away from her Surrealist practice towards purely colour-based expression. Her Taro as Colour works explore the archetypes embodied in tarot by eschewing the heavily symbolic and figurative iconography of extant decks and relying heavily on galactic bursts and swirls of pigment, informed by colour theory and the esoteric guidance of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Ithell did not intend these cards for divination, rather for transcendent spiritual contemplation. Mary Macgregor-Reid was captivated by this series of images and wished to filter her own figurative practice through the clarifying lense of Colquhoun’s sublime colour.

To interpret Colquhoun’s work requires analysis and a yielding of oneself to her inner world; an immersive, subterranean and rewarding experience. She commonly utilised double imagery, surrealist techniques such as automatism and decalcomania and shared secret, learned wisdom to those willing to unearth it. For Colquhoun, art was a form of communication that benefitted the spectator and allowed the artist to attain higher states of consciousness. Communicating Vessels reiterates the role of the artist as a communicator of ideas and concepts, opens up dialogue surrounding our relationship to the earth and celebrates a female artist who has much wisdom left to impart on a contemporary audience.