Roberta Thornley, Spell, 2007. Courtesy of the James Wallace Trust
Works from the Wallace Trust Collection
18 June – 18 September 2011 | FREE
An exhibition about childhood imagining: the art of making stuff, and making
stuff up. Toy Story features highlights from the collection of arts patron, James Wallace including works by Tony de Latour, Jason Grieg, Evan Jones, Saskia Leek, Peter Madden, Seung Yul Oh, Rohan Wealleans, Richard Maloy, Roberta Thornley, Philip Trusttum, Matthew Ellwood and John Oxborough.
Toy Story takes its title from the 1995 Pixar film, which follows the secret adventures of a group of toys who come alive when their human owners are not watching. Like the film it refers to, Toy Story describes childhood as a rich terrain for thinking, imagining and inventing.
In some works, simple materials—rope, cardboard, collaged paper—have been transformed by artists in unexpected ways. In the Rohan Wealleans work Blood Crystal Catcher, rope and plastic have been used to create an over-sized hanging mobile, a devise for catching super-sized dreams (or nightmares) perhaps. Also reinterpreting familiar materials, Richard Maloy deploys the homely medium of butter to suggest abstract painting in the photograph Raw Material #3.
Other artists in this show offer us suggestive or unknown dreamscapes. In The Sleeper, by Susan Jowsey and Marcus Williams, a young girl with a bandaged face holds a sleeping lamb, an image both surreal yet tender. Sleep is also a key factor in Roberta Thornley’s photograph, Pool, where a teenage boy is sprawled against the backdrop of a suburban garden, theatrical lighting providing an underlying sense of unease to the domestic setting.
James Wallace purchased his first art work in the mid 1960s. Today his collection features over 5,000 art works by established and emerging artists, across a wide range of media. In August 2010 the Wallace Arts Trust moved to its new permanent home, the historic Pah Homestead located in Auckland’s Monte Cecilia Park. The Wallace Arts Trust can be seen as both a public collection, in that audience accessibility to the works is given priority, and intensely private, in that the collection remains a series of highly personal choices by the collector.