Allan McDonald, Mt Roskill (2005), Photograph
Group Exhibition: James Williamson’s Ghost
22 September, 2015 - 18 October, 2015
Little Gallery
Co-curated by writer/historian Vaughan Yarwood and photographer Allan McDonald, this exhibition frames a disruptive counter narrative in the Little Gallery at Pah Homestead, that pre-eminent symbol of Victorian Auckland’s entrepreneurial spirit.
Land speculation brought huge rewards but also broke businessmen on the wheel of fortune. The legacy of this is explored through the responses of invited contemporary photographers to David Howard’s dramatic monologue about the financier and landowner who built Pah, James Williamson.
Portraits fade from more than the sun.
What we conceal reveals the most about us.
Our ideals and our contingencies are one…
Contributing photographers are Allan McDonald, Caryline Boreham, Anton Maurer and Haruhiko Sameshima.
David Howard co-founded Takahē magazine (1989), spent 35 years writing The Incomplete Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2011), and collaborated with the artist Peter Ransom on You Look So Pretty When You're Unfaithful To Me (Holloway Press, 2012). He received the NZ Society of Authors Mid-Career Writers' Award (2009), the University of South Pacific Poetry Prize (2011), the Robert Burns Fellowship (2013), and the Otago Wallace Residency (2014).
Allan McDonald lectures in Design & Contemporary Arts at Unitec. Recent exhibitions include Walking in the City (Anna Miles Gallery/Auckland Festival of Photography), The Lay of the Land (Papakura Art Gallery), Freedom Farmers (Auckland Art Gallery) and The Unstable City (TSB Wallace Arts Centre, Unitec Press).
Vaughan Yarwood has, for more than 30 years, traced the country's evolving sense of itself in a range of media. Works include The History Makers: Adventures in New Zealand Biography (Random House, 2002), Farm: The Spirit of Rural New Zealand (Godwit, 2006), and the 50m-long installation Wall of Stories (University of Auckland, 2008).
This exhibition is part of Auckland Heritage Festival 2015.
