Allan McDonald
Material World
23/04/22 — 21/05/22
Material World
23/04/22 — 21/05/22
Material World brings together Allan McDonald’s Here and Now photographs of newspapered windows of shops in transition, made since 2017, with photographs made since 2006. As McDonald writes, “The works in Material World span the last 15 years and are unified by a preoccupation with the materiality of everyday artifacts and the trading places of the analogue world. Many of these things teeter on the edge of redundancy and their anti-iconic setting means that even their relationship to memory is probably tenuous. Still, they have an emblematic quality which the translation of object into photograph helps to preserve.”
Allan McDonald was brought up in the Hutt Valley and has worked with the photographic medium since the 1960s. His association with the documentary tradition is the basis of a distinctive investigation of the vernacular. His work has been included in curated exhibitions from the time of the Manawatu Art Gallery’s The Active Eye (1975) to the present. In 2016, McDonald’s photographs of an anti-Vietnam War Protest in Wellington in 1972, were shown in Auckland Art Gallery’s The Us in I: New Zealand Documentary Photography 1940-1980. Recently his Here and Now series was presented as part of the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi exhibition, Crossings: A group show about intimacies and distances (2021).
McDonald’s recent publications, Between the Silence and the Flame (Rim Books, 2016), Carbon Empire (Rim Books, 2017), and The Holding (Rim Books, 2020), concern different aspects of his archives. Between the Silence and the Flame brings together photographs made in Auckland and Wellington between 1970 and 1972. Carbon Empire, which won the 2017 New Zealand Photobook of the Year award, is comprised of ‘man in the street’ images made in Auckland industrial suburbs in 1997, and photographs of closed petrol stations made in the North Island between 2003 and 2017. The Holding brings together photographs of secondhand bookshops throughout the country and the Here and Now series. McDonald’s work is held in public and provate collections including those of Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
Amethyst, Waihi, 2019
1/3 Pigment print
Wairarapa Times Age 21.4.18 -24.12.18 2018, Featherston
1/3 Pigment print, framed 845 x 1050mm
Sunday Star Times, 22.04.18-15 .07.18, Grey Lynn, from Here and Now
1/3 Pigment print, framed 845 x 1020mm
The Dominion Post, 15.08.2018 – 25.12.2019, Paekakariki
1/3 Pigment print, framed 845 x 1075mm
Vision Times, 16.02.2018 – 19.05.2018, Newmarket
1/3 Pigment print, framed 845 x 1045mm
Dominion Post, 05.09.2020-11.10.2020, Levin, from Here and Now
1/3 Pigment print, framed 845 x 1015mm
Feilding Rangitikei Herald, 26.09.2017-11.03.2018, Taihape, from Here and Now
1/3 Pigment print, framed 845 x 1050mm
The Dominion, 05.05.2016 – 11.10.2017, Levin
1/3 Pigment print, framed 845 x 1060mm
Opunake and Coastal News, 25.05.2019-23.12.2019, Hawera, from Here and Now
1/3 Pigment print, framed 845 x 1015mm
World, 2008
1/3 C-type print, framed 325 x 405mm
New Lynn, 2018
1/3 Pigment print, unframed 735 x 955mm
Masterton, (Second hand shop), 2007, from Point of Sale
1/3 C-type print, framed 530 x 635mm
Flakey Quartz, Thames, 2019
1/3 Pigment print, framed 415 x 520mm
Whanganui (Relocation), 2006
1/3 C-type print, framed dimensions tbc
Waitara, 2010
1/3 Pigment print, unframed 765 x 1000mm
Roller Door, Newmarket, 2022 from Material World
1/3 Pigment print, unframed 480 x 570mm
White Piano, Hobson St, 2021
1/3 Pigment print, framed, 620 x 485mm
Tree, Victoria St, 2021
1/3 Pigment print, unframed dimensions tbc
Rose Quartz, Waihi, 2019
1/3 Pigment print, framed 400 x 316mm