Gone Home 

Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History in Partnership with Wellington’s City Art Gallery will present and exhibition showcasing photographs by Gavin Hipkins and Peter Peryer in a game of visual snap. 

The exhibition opening at Aratoi on Friday March 6^th. Wellington City Gallery Director Robert Leonard will give a free public talk at Aratoi on Saturday 7^th at 11 am. 

A centrepiece of the exhibition is the 80 photograph frieze The Homely 11 by Gavin Hipkins. This body of work was created over sixteen years from 2001 to 2016. The images are of New Zealand ( Hipkins’ home) and the United Kingdom (the homeland)

Hipkins describes the Homely 11 as a ‘Victorian melodrama’ with things utof place . A key image is The Homely Clandon (Hinemihi) a nineteenth century Mãori meeting house transposed into the English countryside. 

The homely 11will be accompanied bya selection of some 50 photographs by Peter Peryer including such classics as Self portrait (1977), My parents (1979) The Frozen Flame(1982) Bluff(1985).

The exhibition takes its title from a photo of gravestone inscribes ‘Gone Home” 

Photographers Hipkins and Peryer belong to different generations. Preyer emerged in the 1970s worked in analogue, with single images of single subjects and primarily in black and white. While Hipkins spanned the transition into digital and tends to create installations and that feature repetition  of imagery.

Yet the similarities between the two artists are significant. Robert Leonard writes “ they are both tourists of photography taking photos on their travels while simultaneously touring the history of conventions, and concerning photography itself, as if it were akin to the landscape . They chose subjects frequently photographed , “echoing photos and photographers who went before them . Their work has a déjá vu quality”. 

The  presentation has previously been shown at Auckland and Christchurch and from Aratoi will travel to Sydney.