by Hollie van Osenbruggen

Last night saw a soiree of great donuts, a full crowd surrounded by a fantastic installation of Jimmy D’s making, which had perfectly arranged models dotted around the gallery in a modern style of tableau vivant.

Although this particular collection comprised of bright colours, a slight shift for designer James Dobson, he kept the classic feel of Jimmy D with the continued exploration of perfect staple pieces with a twist. As well as this, he continued the 90’s punk edge his work takes influence from.

Drawing from the likes of pink film and Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki, the installation performed a conceptual manifestation of growing up in the 1990’s Japan amongst a sleazy culture with the search for emancipation. As a paradox, his collection and abstract featured on the wall of the gallery had an overpowering voice of authority yet the work was almost about having none what so ever; it created a nice contrast for the viewers and solidified Jimmy Ds progression as a confident and thoughtful designer.

by Benjamin Walls

By breaking all the rules of traditional jewellery making, Zora Bell Boyd has established a distinctive style for her pieces. Over the six years her jewellery has made its home in Wunderkammer, Boyd’s work has been highly sought after. Each unique piece has its own rugged beauty, yet seen on the street, one can tell a Boyd piece, for no one does it quite like Zora.

The inspiration for her first official collection, ‘Sticks Stones and Rocks’, comes from the wild West coast town of Muriwai where she resides. Boyd has sourced stones and precious gems from South America and India, and forged them with silver, copper and gold into a comprehensive story of jewellery.

by Blanka Szelyes

Enclosed in grand cliffs and an abundance of Catalonian vegetation, facing the crystal clear Mediterranean lies the arresting sight of Cadaques. A small dreamy town in Costa Brava, characterised by its whitewashed buildings and tranquil deep blue waters. It has always been a haven for many artists. Located in the far north-east of Spain, it was here that Salvador Dali and his lifelong love Gala (born Elena Ivanova Diakonova) met in 1929 and lived on and off for about 50 years.
In walking distance from Cadaques is Port Lligat: a bay refreshing to the eye, where the couple created a home for themselves. The labyrinth of a house is built from several fishermans’ cottages.

La casa de Dali is a must see for all Dali fans. Narrow hallways are filled with taxidermy, sculptures of human body parts, regal-like antique Spanish furniture and different shaped windows in every room. Like his work it is an elaborate metaphor for Dali`s inner mind. Every single area and ornament is a work of art within itself.

The Godfather of surrealism, best known for his ability to translate dreams into art, created some of his best work here. He was very much captivated by the town`s incredible landscape and the sea breeze. Port Lligat became an inspirational point of reference in a lot of his work.
Dali`s many dreamlike works were stimulated by the concept of psychoanalysis (conceived by Freud), combined with sexual desires, vibrant colors and shapes. His home decor is a pure reflection of his style.

There is a lot of experimentation with the hallucinatory, exotic quality of dreams throughout the house. Gala`s hemispherical siesta room is incredibly alive with such qualities. In a Byzantine fashion, a Persian rug dresses the floor and a mustard coloured bench low to the ground encircles the ball shaped room. If you stand in the very middle, the room`s acoustic design echoes your voice off the ceiling. It also allows you to hear someone whispering from across the opposite side of the room, making it sound as if they are whispering straight into your ear. The purpose of this room was to provide a quiet and peaceful reading and resting place for Gala to unwind. The two windows in this room are covered with red curtains that block the sun and create the effect of red lighting.

Dali`s studio is the heart of his home. The one room where visitors feel truly confronted with his artistic spirit. It is as if you feel him present in the room through his work and paraphernalia. Here his flamboyant personality feels alive in the collection of many eccentric props that suggest his fascination with the distortions of reality and technical virtuosity.

The big window in the studio welcomes the warm Spanish sun and shoots it across the room like a glowing source of inspiration, visible in many of his canvases. From this superior vantage point, the beautiful sight of the calm Mediterranean and the cloudless summer sky are sufficient enough to enter a state of tranquility. Familiar props and canvases subtly present themselves gracefully; such as `Gala`s S Foot Left Panel’, placed beside an oval mirror used for self-portraits.

Rumour has it that Dali was inspired by dictators who wore moustaches. Which is why he was always passionate about his waxed upright moustache. It is interesting to note the photographs Dali hung up in the studio of Stalin and 15th century painter Diego Velazquez. In both photos, their moustaches have an imposing presence. All and all, it is an amazing feeling to walk through the place of progressive development of one of the most prolific artists of the twentieth century.

The garden is an extraordinary part of the Dali residence. Designed in typical Mediterranean fashion with olive trees, bright flowers and lavish vines framing cobble stone passageways. It is also characterised by Dali`s concepts through his elaborate penis shaped swimming pool, exclusive Spanish bullfighting sculptures and wacky little chairs. Two idiosyncratic objects that stand out are the lip shaped couch and huge stone eggs.

The house was not the same after Gala passed away in the bedroom one sunny morning in 1982. Dali had felt the house was too empty without his muse and moved out into a castle nearby, where he had buried his wife. Shortly after this, he had lost most of his will to live and suffered severe accidents and injuries, many of them self inflicted, until he died of a heart failure in 1989.

La casa de Dali, once the home of a genius remains much like a structured maze of living spaces, configured in a surreal way. It was here that the couple lived and loved. Dali himself had described it as a: “ true biological structure […]. Each new pulse in our life has its own new cell, a room’’.

by Manisha Anjali

“Your opinion is just as valuable as the president’s,” says Eloise Maree, creator and host of Spark the Conversation, a success at the recent Melbourne Fringe Festival. Spark is a curated conversation, beginning at life and ending at death. This is unique conversational theatre – where actors range from prominent political figures to human rights lawyers, arts industry leaders and the average Australian Joe.

Originating in Brisbane, Spark is broadcasted online to a diverse audience from all over the world. Eloise Maree fleshes out grey areas in current day media representation of political thought. Each episode is heated, controversial and exciting. This is the first project that the 21-year-old theatre student has been given a grant for.

Eloise Maree is essentially an actress, writer and provocateur. She has a number of success stories under her belt, including a role in the lesbian ballroom dancing show Tango Femme earlier this year, and Mad as Molly, her own one-woman show. Last year, Eloise co-wrote and starred in another Melbourne Fringe Festival event, a play called I Hung Out With Gen Y And All I Got Was This Lousy Facebook Account. This play was a critique of unambitious university students with arts degrees proclaiming imagined fame, against a backdrop of the ever-growing world of social media and shameless self-promotion.

Despite her successes, she claims that keeping the arts scene alive is a continuous struggle.“Australian arts just aren’t valued,” she says. “It is a part of life in European culture. Over here we are constantly fighting a battle.”

In the future, Eloise plans to take her work to France. Having already written a play in French, this lady is one to look out for in the future.

To view episodes of Spark, check out www.sparktheconversation.com

by Leanne Gimicke

Cotton, Robinson, Walters and Hotere downstairs form their own mini exhibition. Their pieces are all drawn from the late 80’s and 90’s, a time where they were all enjoying practises as contemporary artists first and foremost – their racial standing taking second place. These three are usually illuminated within the white cube, they are important figures in the history of contemporary New Zealand art. However, at the Adam they are situated at the bottom of the stairwell, in the thoroughfare. This does not seem to be a task in disrobing these iconic three, perhaps more a quiet nod to the path they have paved.

The Inimical: A Selection from The Retreat (by g. bridle) is a space of solace from a conventional museum style display in the Kirk Gallery that posits itself as a private collection within the larger exhibition of collected items in the Adam. The Inimical presents “deliberately produced” fragments, resisting the convention to categorize the items. g. bridle self-reflexively presents objects that are on display precisely as objects to be viewed. This is done through the use of exhibition as a medium; g. bridle’s careful consideration of the formal presentation techniques of exhibition such as the nature of shelving and particular framing affect the ‘neutral’ display of the objects and draw attention to their staging.

“The museum is still defined as a repository of works, one that, according to its consensual quality, gives cultural standing to whoever owns it.”³

Within The Inimical, a photograph of a crow, a collector of particular shiny items it deems important, hints towards an arbitrary collection method, much like Behind Closed Doors which isolates a criteria- work from private collections in Wellington- in order to assemble a display.

“You who read me- are you certain you understand my language?”⁴

Baudrillard suggests that all objects that are possessed by a collector submit to a mutual relationship with all the other objects in a collection. This relationship renders all objects in a collection equivalent because they all refer back to the collector and the collector determines their meaning.

In the Lower Chartwell Gallery is a section on abstract paintings; the show notes ask whether abstract painting might be the perfect collectable commodity. Abstract painting is a trace of the world, suppressed and removed from nature in an attempt to possess it. Abstract paintings then mirror items from collections that are also removed from their original contextual space.

Paintings by artists such as Julian Dasper, Patrick Lundberg, Bill Hammond line the walls of the rectangular space. On the end wall a Michael Smither’s painting of a diver suspends time in the freeze-frame image of a figure mid-dive. The diver’s trajectory in the painting is not evident nor is the point of origin. We can know about this single isolated moment but all others evade us…

The diver like the collected artworks in Behind Closed Doors, records a specific moment in time. This exhibition charts New Zealand art history through a series of moments, traces of which Barton has uncovered in private collections in Wellington. Barton has brought the objects from private collections into the space of a public art gallery, examining how these works function as part of a new larger order of other works that have also undergone “passionate abstraction”⁵ in the act of collection. Behind Closed Doors considers the potential for artworks to accrue new meaning and value as they develop a distinguished provenance through contact with new owners and contexts.

“We live in a world where practical and ethical coherence depends on the ability to invent meaningful connections between incommensurable cognitive territories but also on the ability to inhabit creatively the uncertain interstices between these continually mutating zones.”⁶

^{1 Luis Camnitzer}

^{2 Roger Cardinal}

^{3 Luis Camnitzer}

^{4 Jorge Luis Borges}

^{5 Jean Baudrillard}

^{6 Olafur Eliasson}