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We’ve just opened our Francis Upritchard survey show, Jealous Saboteurs. In 1998, after graduating from Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch, Upritchard emigrated to London, where she would become one of New Zealand’s most successful artists. She maintains a close relationship with New Zealand, regularly returning to work and show here.

Upritchard has developed a unique sculptural language. Her works often look like artefacts and museum exhibits. They are rife with allusions to elsewheres and elsewhens. Upritchard interweaves references to archeology and anthropology, to modernism and hippiedom, to nostalgia and futurism. When she represented New Zealand in the Venice Biennale in 2009, she famously explained: ‘I want to create a visionary landscape, which refers to the hallucinatory works of the medieval painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, and simultaneously draws on the utopian rhetoric of post-1960s counterculture, high modernist futurism and the warped dreams of survivalists, millenarians, and social exiles.’

Upritchard’s works combine figurative sculptures, glass and ceramics, found objects, and furniture. She draws on a diversity of art and craft traditions, and often collaborates with artisans. Her most recent sculptures—solitary figures, on metal stands—explore ethnic and cultural types, but remain enigmatic. Are they lovers or fighters, primitives or hippies, wise ones or imbeciles? Are they from then or now—or, indeed, from nowhere and the future? Have they transcended history or has it transcended them? It is hard to know if Upritchard is poking fun at her subjects or taking them seriously. Her aims remain elusive. Ambiguity is her thing.

Jealous Saboteurs is Upritchard’s first survey exhibition. It covers twenty years of work, ranging from little-known art-school works to works produced this year. It’s a joint project with Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, curated by their Director Charlotte Day and myself. At City Gallery, it runs until 16 October 2016. And there’s a book on the way. (Here’s my essay.)

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I’ve just spent the weekend on art camp in New Plymouth, attending the opening of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s ambitious new show Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, curated by Geoff Batchen. My favourite work in it is Swiss artist Christian Marclay’s Allover (Rush, Barbara Streisand, Tina Turner, and Others) (2008). It’s a knockout.

These days, some artists want to be ahead of the curve, negotiating the frontiers of new media, but many more are nostalgic for old media that are past their use-by dates. It has become a genre and the Marclay is a textbook example. He smashed-up audio cassettes—featuring music from Rush, Barbara Streisand, Tina Turner, and others—and spread fragments of their shells and lengths of their magnetic tape across a massive sheet of cyanotype photographic paper, exposed it to light, and developed it. Presto! The gesture piles redundancy upon redundancy, cross-referencing photography, music, and painting.

First, the work is a photogram and a cyanotype. The photogram is a primitive, cameraless form of photography and the cyanotype is an early type of photographic paper. Some of the earliest photos are cyanotypes, including photograms of botanical specimens and contact prints of drawings and graphics. The cyanotype survived, for a long time, as a means to reproduce architectural drawings (blueprints) and for proofing film for offset printing, but, today, it is little use to anyone.

Second, the ostensible subject—the audio cassette—is an obsolete analogue music format, redundant in this, our digital age. Landfill. Replacement value zero.

Third, the end result looks like an old Jackson Pollock action painting—it has that scale. Marclay links the Pollock idea—of ‘the brushstroke’ as a trace or record of the painter’s performance—with the way musical performances are recorded on tape. The work is paradoxical: Pollock was all about direct, unmediated expression (now a discredited, redundant idea), and yet Marclay foregrounds the detritus of mediation.

The now-retro recorded musics of Rush, Streisand, and Turner may be somehow registered here, but as ghosts—inaudible and indistinguishable. Marclay’s haunting, elegiac image suggests the streamers and rubbish left behind after a parade, reminding us that photography is a graveyard, the ultimate memorial medium. Go to New Plymouth, read it and weep. (Until 14 August.)

My new show, Bullet Time, showcases the work of two New Zealand video artists who conjure with time—Daniel Crooks and Steve Carr. It places them in the context of two historical photographers, pioneers of motion studies—Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and Harold Edgerton (1903–90)—acknowledging them as precursors, influences and reference points. In the process, it engages a complex history of interaction between science and art, photography and cinema, technology and consciousness, thought and feeling.

The show’s title comes from the cinema special-effect made famous by The Matrix (1999). For ‘bullet time’ effects, a set of still cameras surrounding a subject are fired simultaneously or almost simultaneously. Compiled as a movie, the shots offer an orbiting view of the subject, either frozen in time or in super-slow motion, messing with our sense of space and time.

The Matrix’s bullet-time effects looked back to the work of Eadweard Muybridge. In the nineteenth century, there was much debate about whether a horse’s hooves all come off the ground at once during the gait. It occurred too fast to see with the naked eye. The former Californian Governor, railways magnate, and racehorse breeder Leland Stanford engaged Muybridge, the photographer, to furnish evidence to settle the matter. Using a bank of cameras with fast shutters triggered by trip wires, he captured a succession of images of a horse in full stride, proving the theory of ‘unsupported transit’. These images forever changed the way we see horses and led to the development of the cinema.

Based in Melbourne, Daniel Crooks generates bewildering time-space warps by rearranging slivers of digital video information. His Time Slice works look back to Muybridge and to the slit-scan photography used for racetrack photofinishes, and nod to the metaphors used to explain relativity.

At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the 1930s, Harold Edgerton pioneered the use of stroboscopic flash photography to study motion. He froze running water, splashes of milk, athletes in action, bullets ripping through balloons, apples, bananas, and playing cards, and exploding atomic bombs. While his work revealed scientific truths, it often had a spectacular, erotic aspect.

Riffing on Edgerton, Steve Carr uses slow-motion to observe bursting paint-filled balloons and bullets tearing open apples. He’s less interested in the scientific aspect than the semiological one. Bullet Time also includes his six-channel video installation Transpiration (2014). Filmed with a time-lapse camera, white carnations planted in dyed water slowly absorb its hues, blushing with colour. (City Gallery Wellington, 25 March–10 July 2016.) (Here’s my essay.)