Gavin Hipkins
Gavin Hipkins is an Auckland-based artist who works with photography and film. Over the last two decades his practice has engaged postcolonial, architectural, and commodity discourses via a range of analogue and digital technologies, photo-installations, and artist videos.
In 2010 he started making fragmented narrative short films that frequently call on nineteenth-century literary references, and adapts these writings to contemporary settings. His projects engage film as a cinematic art that blurs definable genres between drama, documentary, film essay, and experimental narrative structures. “With recent projects I am reminded of Mikhail Bakhtin’s persuasive argument that language ‘even within a single sentence’ is frequently double-voiced. Within single narrative structures, two components are brought together to produce a third meaning: a hybridity; technologically woven from a negotiation of two discreet and interconnecting narrative elements, disparate times, conflated cultural and social meanings.”
In 2014, Hipkins’ first feature film Erewhon — an essay adaptation of Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, Or Over the Range — premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival and Edinburgh Art Festival.
Other recent exhibitions and screenings include: 2016 International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (International Competition), Germany; 2015 International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands; 2015 The Jewish Museum, New York, USA; 2014 Museum of Arts and Design, New York, USA; 2012 Armory Film, The Armory Show, New York, USA; 2011 Envisioning Buildings: Reflecting Architecture in Contemporary Art Photography, Austrian Museum of Applied and Contemporary Art (MAK), Vienna, Austria; 2011 Recontres Internationales: Nouveau Cinema & Art Contemporain, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; 2010 Unnerved: The New Zealand Project, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.
Hipkins is an Associate Professor at Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2017
Gavin Hipkins: The Domain, The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt
Block Sculptures, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
2016
Erewhon, Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth
Block Paintings, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
2015
Block Paintings, Starkwhite, Auckland
Erewhon, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
Erewhon, Mangere Arts Centre, Auckland
2014
Erewhon, Edinburgh Art Festival/New Zealand International Film Festival, (92 min.)
Gavin Hipkins: Leisure Valley, ST PAUL St Gallery, Auckland University of Technology
Erewhon: The Book of the Machines, Starkwhite, Auckland
Die Ausgrabung (with Karl Fritsch), Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic
2013
The Dam (O), The New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington
Der Tiefenglanz III (with Karl Fritsch), Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane, (Australia)
The Quarry, The Physics Room, Christchurch
Der Tiefenglanz Im Schmuckladen (with Karl Fritsch), Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
2012
This Fine Island, The New Zealand Film Archive, Auckland
Der Tiefenglanz (with Karl Fritsch), Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
Second Pavilion, Starkwhite, Auckland
Der Tiefenglanz II (with Karl Fritsch), Starkwhite, Auckland
2011
The Pavilion, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane, (Australia)
2010
Bible Studies (New Testament), Starkwhite, Auckland
The Valley, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
2009
Bible Studies (New Testament), Adam Art Gallery, Wellington
The Colony 2000, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
The Island, Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown (ICAN), Sydney, (Australia)
Proverb of Hell, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland
2008
Second Empire (New World), Kaliman Gallery, Sydney, (Australia)
Second Empire (The Passage), Starkwhite, Auckland
The Menagerie, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, New South Wales
Natural History, Starkwhite, Auckland
The Terrace, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington
