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Ilsa: Let’s see, the last time we met …
Rick: Was La Belle Aurore.
How nice, you remembered. But, of course, that was the day the Germans marched into Paris.
Not an easy day to forget.
No.
I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.
—Casablanca, 1942
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[IMAGE: Stardust Memories 1980]
New American Art
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I saw this colouring-in book at the Philadelphia railway station. I couldn’t bring myself to buy a copy. My sense of irony didn’t stretch that far. It’s an interesting time to be in America.
Roman Candle
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When you curate a show, you have to work with what you can lay your hands on, what someone else will lend, what you can afford to ship. When you’re based in New Zealand, that’s a major constraint. When we were doing the Sister Corita Kent show a few months ago, we wanted to present Ed Ruscha as a parallel figure—a Catholic (albeit lapsed) text-based pop artist. We borrowed the beautiful 1986 Ruscha painting, Love Chief, from Auckland Art Gallery. We hoped the words ‘love chief’—combined with the miraculous lights of the iconic LA street grid, viewed from on high—would carry enough religious connotation. But yesterday, visiting the Fisher Landau Center, in Queens, New York, I chanced upon the perfect example from the same series, Christ Candle (1987). It would have nailed our point like Christ to the Cross. QED.
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Who Am I?
I am a contemporary-art curator and writer, and Director of the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. I have held curatorial posts at Wellington’s National Art Gallery, New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery, and, most recently, City Gallery Wellington, and directed Auckland’s Artspace. My shows include Headlands: Thinking through New Zealand Art for Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (1992); Action Replay: Post-Object Art for Artspace, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, and Auckland Art Gallery (1998); and Mixed-Up Childhood for Auckland Art Gallery (2005). My City Gallery shows include Yvonne Todd: Creamy Psychology (2014), Julian Dashper & Friends (2015), Francis Upritchard: Jealous Saboteurs (2016), Colin McCahon: On Going Out with the Tide (2017), John Stezaker: Lost World (2017), This Is New Zealand (2018), Iconography of Revolt (2018), Semiconductor: The Technological Sublime (2019), Oracles (2020), Zac Langdon-Pole: Containing Multitudes (2020), and Judy Millar: Action Movie (2021). I curated New Zealand representation for Brisbane’s Asia-Pacific Triennial in 1999, the Sao Paulo Biennale in 2002, and the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2015. I am co-publisher of the imprint Bouncy Castle.
Contact
BouncyCastleLeonard@gmail.com
+61 452252414
This Website
I made this website to offer easy access to my writings. Texts have been edited and tweaked. Where I’ve found mistakes, I’ve corrected them.
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