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.)

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Julian Dashper has been a key figure in New Zealand art since the mid-1980s. He changed the way we think about New Zealand art history. Dashper made art about art. Some of his works pay homage to older celebrated artists, particularly canonical figures of New Zealand art, including Colin McCahon and Rita Angus; others address the workings of the art system. From the mid-1990s, he increasingly exhibited overseas, becoming an international artist. Dashper died of melanoma in 2009—he was just 49. Today, he represents a transitional figure between the ‘New Zealand painting’ that preceded him and the new generation of post-nationalist, post-medium artists that followed.

Dashper was an important artist for me. I can’t think of another artist who has been as influential on my practice as a curator. So, it’s been a huge pleasure to curate the exhibition Julian Dashper & Friends. It’s a tribute show, and, for me, something of a labour of love.

Dashper’s work was self-consciously art historical—it was always in dialogue with other artists’ work. He was one of New Zealand’s most influenced artists and one of its most influential artists. Because of that, I thought that presenting his work in splendid isolation would be confusing, like listening in to one side of a phone conversation. So, instead, my show presents his works in conversation with works by other artists—his elders, his contemporaries, and younger artists. These ‘friends’ include Rita Angus, Billy Apple, Daniel Buren, Fiona Connor, Colin McCahon, Dane Mitchell, Milan Mrkusich, John Nixon, John Reynolds, Peter Robinson, Marie Shannon, Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, Jan van der Ploeg, and Gordon Walters. Friendship wasn’t incidental to Dashper’s project, it was his medium. (Julian Dashper & Friends, City Gallery Wellington, 5 December 2015–15 May 2016.) (Here’s my essay and here’s Peter Ireland’s review.)

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Wellington art dealer Peter McLeavey is no longer with us, but his legend lives on. Indeed, it grows stronger. Facebook is creaking with tributes, with everyone claiming a connection. McLeavey was a brilliant gallerist, a consummate salesman, a storyteller. It’s hard to imagine New Zealand art without him. In Wellington in the late 1960s and 1970s, he pioneered art dealing—at least, his brand of it. He was influential. Those who followed, especially in Wellington, had to contend with his example, his preeminence.

He had his shtick. Although visitors to his gallery had met him countless times before, McLeavey would sometimes pretend they were strangers. He’d greet them with an odd mix of humility and presumption. He’d say, ‘Hello, my name is Peter McLeavey. I show modern art. I know what the old people think of my gallery. But tell me, what about the young people in the discotheques—what do they think of my gallery?’ When Hamish McKay opened his gallery in Wellington in the early 1990s, he put his own spin on McLeavey’s routine. When people visited his gallery—the young people’s gallery—McKay would say, ‘Hello, my name is Hamish McKay. I show contemporary art. I know what the young people think of my gallery. But tell me, what about the old people on their heart-lung machines—what do they think of my gallery?’

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And, with McLeavey, there was much to imitate. His departure creates a vacuum.