Ecology 2020

Big Words/Bigger Actions

Opening 11am Saturday 8th February

Open 8th February – 8th March 2020

The exhibition Ecology 2020. Big Words/Bigger Actions, opens on Saturday 8 February at 11am and runs through February at Village Arts Gallery, Kohukohu, finishing on March 8.

The exhibition is allied to the Hokianga Festival for Change on the weekend 28th Feb to 01 March. The festival is billed as ‘A community event showcasing a range of multi-media work suggesting how we might change the way we live’. Our own exhibition aims to put the ‘multi’ into the media.

And as well as the festival speakers and performers, we have our own great speaker event on Sunday March 1, so watch our social media for that.

And… if that isn’t exciting enough…

This exhibition is about change. One of the things we can all do is lessen our dependency on our cars. We invite people with bikes (electric or manual) to cycle to the opening. You will be an opportunity at the opening to test drive an electric bike.

Summer Show 2019

The Village Arts Summer Show is a showcase for our Northland artists’ artwork, craft, and objects, that can be taken home on purchase. Come to the opening to support our artists and to get first pick, and come again when the show has updated after the Christmas rush. Our shop has smaller works ideal for Christmas gifts, and there will be a small vintage collection in the Great Little Room.
Many thanks to our supporters. It has been a great year for art at the gallery and we are planning a stimulating 2020 programme.

Charlie Dawes

Everybody’s Artist Photographer

Opening 11am 30th November 2019

Open 30th November to 15th December 2019

Starting on Saturday, November 30th, this exhibition has photos of the Hokianga, from family portraits to landscapes, taken during his time in the Hokianga during the late 1800s to the early 1900s.

A Pōwhiri held at 11am on the 30th November to acknowledged the artist/photographer and the people in the photos; they are our community’s taonga.

Come along to this excellent snapshot of Kohukohu at this time.

Charles Peet Dawes spent most of his life in Kohukohu, Hokianga. He was a jack-of-all-trades, working variously as a carrier, mailman, nightsoil collector and orchardist.
He was also a photographer, running a studio in Kohukohu probably from at least 1892 to around 1925.
When he died in 1947 his glass plates were dispersed, but a box of his plates were found under a house in Umawera in the late 1960s. Their value was recognised by Ben Te Wake from Te Karaka, and later given to the Northern Advocate in Whangārei. In a junk shop in Auckland’s Upper Queen St. in the 1970s. another box of plates were found, and around 475 negatives were discovered in a secondhand store in Kaitaia in 2012.
Together with the 1,650 glass negatives gifted by Dawes descendants in 2018, these now form the Dawes collection at Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero Central City Library. Many of the photographs in this collection are on display for the first time
This collection is an extraordinary documentation of the life and times of the people of Hokianga at the height of the timber industry.
Village Arts would like to thank the Auckland City Library, and No.1 Gallery in Rāwene.
We acknowledge and mihi to the local whānau whose ancestors are recorded here in this collection.

The gallery also has a selection of water colour paintings of colonial buildings by local identity Malcolm Pinkney.

Colour Explosion

When nature is unsteady

Opening 11am Saturday 2nd November 2019

Open 2nd – 26th November 2019

Village Arts Gallery brings something truly amazing to the Hokianga on November 2nd.

One of New Zealand’s major ceramicists will exhibit installations and svelte hand-thrown shapes and vessels in a show that will excite and energise.

John Parker is known for his ribbed, modernist ceramic pieces that result in sell-out shows, but he is equally known as an award-winning theatre designer. In Colour Explosion he draws on the drama of his theatre design to make startling light-responsive ceramic installations, with lighting designed by John Wigglesworth.

Exhibited alongside Parker are bold gestural works in explosive colour by Jane Molloy-Wolt. One of the most productive and experimental professional painters in Northland, Molloy-Wolt explores themes of unstable geography and suspended belief.

We hope you will join us in celebrating this unique show, giving a warm Hokianga welcome to our guests; and taking the chance to talk with them.

www.johnparker.co.nz

First Encounters

expect the unexpected

Opening 11am Saturday 21st September

Open 21st September to 27th October 2019

Join Village Arts Gallery at the upcoming exhibition ‘First Encounters: expect the unexpected’ where the contributing artists reflect on the many firsts of early New Zealand.

The exhibition is inspired by ‘Tuia Encounters 250’, the government event focusing on Cook’s voyage in 1769 marking 250 years since the first onshore meeting between Māori and Europeans. The contributing artists have looked beyond that specific event and given us their personal responses to the diverse first encounters that form our history, in which Hokianga has a prominent place.