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My new exhibition—Unseen City: Gary Baigent, Rodney Charters, and Robert Ellis in Sixties Auckland—just opened at Te Uru, in Titirangi. It’s a pet project. The show grew out of my fondness for two works made by then-young artists in the 1960s—Rodney Charters’s short film Film Exercise (1966) and Gary Baigent’s photobook The Unseen City: 123 Photographs of Auckland (1967).

In the 1960s, Auckland was growing. Its population passed half a million and new motorways were enabling suburban sprawl. It was also the dawn of the counterculture. In both the Baigent and the Charters works, roads, cars, and motorbikes play starring roles. Both works contrast a conservative older generation with the beautiful young people. Now, they read as time capsules.

Originally, my plan was to simply juxtapose the film and the photos. Robert Ellis came in later, when the discovery of some little-known 1960s drawings revealed how much Auckland’s new motorways had informed his iconic Motorways paintings.

For me, the show has personal resonance. I was born in Auckland in 1963. Most of the images were made when I was a small child. While they tally with my earliest memories, they concern a place I never really knew. And, I suspect, for others—and in different ways—the show may be something of a nostalgia trip.

Unseen City runs until 16 August 2015. If you can’t get to Titirangi, the show comes to City Gallery Wellington in December. Thanks to Andrew Clifford and his team at Te Uru. (Here’s my essay, and here’s John Hurrell’s review and Tim Corballis’s.)