publications

Peter Stichbury: The Alumni

ISBN: 978-0-9582891-2-2

$49.95

Peter Stichbury's seductive paintings engage in pointed dialogue with the world of popular culture.  Drawing directly from the commercial imagery of advertising and celebrity, he delivers back exaggerated renditions which question our attachment to such images.

In the Alumni, his painted characters fill the gallery walls like the extreme sub-sets of a school - the beauties, the nerds, the normal and the totally strange.  The school system is the ground upon which Stichbury builds.  His paintings engage with the hierarchies, pecking orders and power games of the classroom, which in turn are both a microcosm and a distortion of the social world.

He is a moden day society painter, in the truest sense of the description.  As such, he paints not only contemporary figures, but characters which operate within a contemporary understanding, including the celluloid world of film and television and the wider realm of pop and celebrity culture.  The young men and women he dipicts are seamless composites cerated from multiple images, the famous, the infamous and the deeply personal morphed together.  This is painting which operates knowingly within a 'post-human' environment, where genetic engineering and cosmetic surgery have collapsed the boundaries of what we consider natural.  Plastic surgery, skin disorders, eugenics and genetic engineering:  the human body, his paintings suggest, occupies a kind of shifting and fluid terrain where all things are possible.

Peter Stichbury's paintings are alluring yet ultimately contrary.  Glossy and highly polished of surface, beneath the immaculate facades of his portraits lurks a much darker and disturbing reality.

Bruce Barber: Work 1970 - 2008

ISBN 978 1 920781 44 6

$25.00

Developing out of major survey exhibitions at Artspace Visual Arts Centre (Australia) and Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts (New Zealand), this book surveys almost four decades of work by Canada-based artist Bruce Barber. Ranging across performance, installation, film, video and photography, Barber's practice has long been consistently situational and propositional, resulting in works that engage and question social and political regimes of power. Edited by Stephen Cleland and Blair French, this book features extensive documentation of Barber's work between 1970 and 2008 along with contributions by Bruce Barber, Christina Barton, Brad Buckley, Emma Bugden, Mark A. Cheetham, Alex Gawronski, Marc James Léger and Laura Preston.

The Land Wars Reader

978-0-9582891-1-5

$25.00

Land Wars is a major project held at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts in 2008 over several platforms.

Who has control over land, and who doesn't?

What are the changing circumstances for land use?

The Land Wars Reader is a publication which expands and extends the ideas raised within Land Wars. The Reader includes commissioned and existing texts by a range of writers including academics, activists and artists and is co-published by Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts and PROGRAM, Berlin.