I hope you enjoy these pictures of birds and of the inner life of Rembrandt's paintings. Please sit a while!

My lovely dog doesn't like birds. I've watched him race down Paekakariki Beach countless times, frantically trying (and failing) to catch them.

Watching those birds scatter off in all directions, I've remembered Charles Darwin's thoughts about ‘endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful’ and John Berger’s theories on ‘ways of seeing’. Each movement can create innumerable forms, depending on how you look.

In Rembrandt's centuries-old paintings I see the same vitality, life and movement as I do in those birds. I've never seen an original, but I can reach out to them.  Figures appear dreamlike – often sad, always beautiful – through the pale blue glow of my laptop screen. I long to see the paintings.

A hundred years ago Anton Chekhov's ‘The Student’ saw the past as ‘an unbroken chain of events all flowing from one to another’. While I'm not saying Rembrandt's paintings have anything to do with my dog's sincere desire to chase any and every bird on the beach, I am saying that movement never has to stop. A painting’s life remains in motion in the digital world, just as a bird's flight leaves ripples in the sky.

As Chekhov’s Student found - when you touch one end of the chain the other trembles.

Camus Wyatt - ‘A thin streak of light’
January 2019

Camus Wyatt's exhibition 'A thin streak of light' is at Photospace Gallery, 37 Courtenay Place, Wellington, from 16th February to 23rd March, 2019. The exhibition comprises a series of photographs on lightboxes (in room 1) and a series of archival pigment prints (Rembrandt series) in rooms 3 and 4.
The exhibition opens on Friday, 15th February, 5pm-7pm. You are most welcome to attend.

I have been travelling the Akatarawa Road for a long time; in my youth sometimes drunk at two o’clock in the morning, having near death experiences on motorcycles, these days more leisurely dawn trips to find that beautiful light before the direct sun, the flat light with subtle shadows. An overcast day is good, or just after rain; the effect is like spitting on a stone.

It took a while to find the right camera, the right lens, the right film. I have settled on a medium-format panoramic camera and Fuji Velvia 120 roll film. I am very fond of Velvia. It’s a bit Barnum and Bailey; accentuating colour; it  was popular with advertising photographers making commercials.  As much as I admire black and white photography I can’t get past the idea that the world is in colour. There is elegance in black and white, but colour, like the world, is often messy and chaotic. 

It took a while to work out what I was trying to do with this exhibition. This is my best provisional theory:

The Akatarawa Road is a marginal road. It has an arrogance about it as it forces through the landscape, working with it but always to its own ends. The road allows us to move quickly, often not noticing anything beyond its edges. Used as a challenging shortcut or a racetrack, the road services lifestyle blocks, a few small farms, and a saw-mill. A lot of rubbish is dumped, cars are torched, there’s road kill, graffiti, deer, the odd crash, and hunters - people with guns. Akatarawa is not a very important road but secretive and busy in its way, an under-the-radar sort of road, important to me, and the last place huia were seen in the North Island.

I am interested in how our culture defines beauty.  Rilke says beauty is the beginning of terror. This is true but it is also the beginning of deception. I feel that rather than only a select group of things being beautiful, everything is beautiful. I am fascinated by the seemingly mundane, by the roadside things mostly ignored. I am not really interested in prelapsarian Romantic landscapes but more in what people do with them.  There is richness in this road for me. It is a microcosm of our society, smaller and slower, easier to digest.

- Dan Anbury, 2018

The terrible, lightest wind in the world
Blows from word to word, from ear
To ear, from name to name, from secret
Name to secret name. You maybe
Did not know you had another
Sound and sign signifying you.

- From The Secret Name, W S Graham.

Between me and you
Briarna Martelletti

Intimacy is an important aspect within our daily lives. It is grounded through memory and time, between people, our surroundings, and objects. It exists through being in touch with ourselves, and others who we surround ourselves with. Between me and you asserts intimacy as a physical and emotional space embodied in the artist’s everyday life, friendships and connections.

Suspension
Michael McKeagg

Suspension is a project that explores how black and white, analogue photography can operate as memento mori while examining fragments of personal escapism and youth.  While utilising aspects of snapshot photography, the project’s observational documentary notions help create narrative from the aspects of my daily life and experiences.

Persona Obscura
Rebecca Collins

Persona Obscura engages in a discussion of gender and vision, considering the artists own position as a contemporary, middle-class Pākehā woman. Made with a camera, the work exposes an intimate visuality, curating aspects of a personal interior and revealing them in a public space. The autobiographical nature of the work pays attention to sensory details, embodied actions and spatial explorations.

Malleable
Calum Turner
Malleable represents a new variety of perspectives on masculinity held by young adults in New Zealand – a demographic that is situated at the point of tension between already-established cultural definitions, and an evolving global dialogue of what gender identity means.