City Art is a conservation framing workshop and gallery offering a range of museum-standard picture framing and art care services to artists, art collectors, museums and galleries.

Michael Reed

Since graduating from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts Michael Reed has gone on to establish a career as a printmaker, mixed-media artist and textile designer. He exhibits in New Zealand and in galleries and museums in Australia, Japan, the UK, Europe and the United States. Since 1994 he has been a member of the NZ Contemporary Medallion Group and Federation Internationale de la Medaille. He currently teaches at the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, having also worked as a graphic designer, illustrator and textile designer. His research and art-making activities have included designing and hand-printing limited edition books and designing and making commemorative medallions. Examples of Michael’s work are held in both public and private collections in the New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands and in Britain. In 2002 he was selected for training in Japanese traditional woodblock printing at the Nagasawa Art in Japan.

“Raro, Sweet Raro” (2006) is a sequence of nine assemblages of painting, screen-printing and photography. In these works Michael Reed explores the impact of tourism on a small island nation, both as a blessing and, potentially, as a curse. The images reflect the experience of the traveller – things half glimpsed and only partly understood, fleeting impressions that provide a sense of place, the pulse of bright colours and rhythms of local life that run parallel to the continued entrance and exit of the tourist.

“‘Raro, Sweet Raro’ and an accompanying body of work entitled ‘Cultural Vulture’ began with a long admired Cook Island carving in storage at Canterbury Museum, a fragment of a Rarotongan God Stick. This prompted me to research the influence of early Christian missionaries on the demise of men’s woodcarving in the Cook Islands, a disapproved of practice that produced ‘heathen effigies’. The trail led me to a portrait of the Reverend John Williams of the London Missionary Society, posing with his trophies, assorted cultural plunder. The portrait was studio-painted in England, complete with a ship-deck setting and South Pacific background of coconut palms. Amongst the curiosities at the feet of this early cultural vulture was a Rarotongan God Stick, not unlike the object of my admiration. Returning from a short visit to Rarotonga in 1999 I began to think about the possibilities of a large-scale art piece that reflected the surface skim of tourist experience, the quick-fix, perhaps flippant ‘been there, done that’. In early 2004 I returned to Rarotonga to gather more imagery and to revisit the concept. This visit changed the aesthetic, some content and the techniques” – Michael Reed.

Gallery:

Peter Adsett
Mark Braunias
Marcus Capes
Peter Carson
Stephen Clarke
Allen Cox
Michael Dell
Andrew Drummond
Guy Frederick
Michael Hamblett
Jeffrey Harris
Roger Hickin
Maree Horner
Kathryn Madill
Michael Reed
Zina Swanson
Philip Trusttum