To celebrate Maori language Week I thought I'd post some shots of a friend and beautiful artist Natasha Keating. Super nice to have had the chance to spend time with Natasha while she worked.
art
Another visit to Touch My Junk
Hidden behind a poster and graffiti covered doorway on Karangahape Road is another world that can only really be understood and appreciated by making a visit.
Felicity Hazlett has collected the most amazing amount of vintage clothing, art, and other goodies that cannot really be explained with words. Its taken me more than a couple of visits to not be completely visually overwhelmed by what I see.
Touch My Junk is a retro clothing store and costume hire/styling service.....
Jewels art and retro madness
Ko Koe Ko Au
One of my favourite New Zealand artists has teamed up with Tuhoe activist Tame Iti to produce a series of paintings that are now on exhibition here in Auckland at the OD Gallery on Karangahape Road.
The exhibition is entitled Ko Koe Ko Au meaning You and I. The theme behind the project was to illustrate how Maori and non-Maori can work together to achieve common goals. A true statement about the only way Aotearoa as a nation can move forward in the future.
I have a real respect for people like Tame who are willing to speak their true beliefs and create conversation and argument around subjects that need to be discussed rather than ignored. I enjoyed seeing another way in which Tame expresses himself through his art and the way he and Owen collaborated. As always OD's portraits are epic!!
"Reely and truly" by Tyrone Lebon
A friend sent me a link to an awesome documentary about photography and photographers. It explores a subject I've been thinking about a lot recently, looking at the blurry space that photography exists in halfway between fact and fiction, art and documentary and all of the above at the same time
"Reely and Truly" is a recent documentary(2014) directed by Tyrone Lebon and features images and concepts from 30 photographers from around the world.
Throughout watching the film I was really challenged to explore my own definitions of words such as truth, fact, fiction, reality and perception and how these words apply not only to my photography, but to my perceptions of my life. How I see a person or a situation, and the impressions that remain with me afterward, how I form my own memories. All of these concepts are particularly relevant to photography and the feelings and memories my and other photographers images create.
These concepts are of course applicable to any art form, but I find them really interesting when related to photography which is quite often perceived as a factual or visual record of a moment. Since the birth of photography there has been an ongoing discussion about whether or not photography is art, and the comments in this movie continue to challenge both sides of this argument.
There's a lot I could say about what I got from this film but I thinks its best if you just watch it yourself and challenge your own ideas......