Gavin Hipkins

Gavin John Hipkins (born 1968 in Auckland) is a New Zealand photographer and film-maker, and Associate Professor at Elam School of Fine Arts, at the University of Auckland.

In this series, Hipkins used ready-made images, sourced from kitschy offset prints made in Switzerland in 1978, which he bought in West Auckland.

He reproduced the images as large rectangular wallpaper murals (2160 x 4800 mm each).

The New Age works are closely linked to the photographs in The Sanctuary series.

Photographs of New Zealand's West Coast and other personally significant landscapes are overlaid with photograms of beads.

The original photographs are sourced from Hipkins' own archive, using existing works that have rarely been printed.

In The Field 1,500 photograms produced by placing a polystyrene ball on a sheet of photographic paper and exposing it to light.

The photograms were shown as a single massed grid on the gallery wall.

The work was shown at Teststrip, an artist-run gallery in Auckland, and at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

Hipkins completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 1992 and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia in 2002.

Throughout his career, Hipkins has worked with both analogue and digital forms of photography.

His work is often produced as either discrete multi-part works or, more rarely, in ongoing series.

Hipkins began working with the format he used for a number of works, collectively known as Falls, while he was still at art school.

These works are made up of 'vertical strip[s] of machine prints, which present the content of a single roll of film—a session of almost identical shots of one subject from more or less the same angle, like a ‘shot’ of film footage'.

Zerfall Wellington 1 March 1996 (1996) is made up of images from a firework display.

Falls, Zerfall (1997–1998), shown at the 1998 Biennale of Sydney, consisted of images of circular objects usually found in kitchens and bathrooms.

A set of seven Falls, titled The Gulf, mixed images collected from pornography websites (each work was titled after a genre: Teen, Blonde, Mature, Asian, Latina, Ebony, and Red-headed) mixed with stereotypical imagery from travel advertising, photos of small accessories (buttons, ribbon) and neutral background textures.

In 1997, Hipkins visited Chandigarh in Northern India.

The city contains many buildings by architect Le Corbusier, and his symbolic structure, the Open Hand Monument, a metal weather vane that rotates in the wind.

The Trench is a slide show of 80 photographs taken of the monument, each one double-exposed with an image of a rose from Chandigarh’s rose garden.

As the images of the hand form rotate in the photographs, the roses move from red to orange to yellow.

The 80 c-type prints in The Homely were taken over a period of several years, on trips around New Zealand and Australia.

In this work, Hipkins explored the idea of nationhood, and the signs and symbols used to express a sense of belonging to a place, especially, as he described it, 'in the turbulent wake of British Imperialism'.

Each work is individually titled with a date, a named object, and a location, and the 80 works were hung alongside each other in a continuous display.

In the publication accompanying the exhibition art historian Peter Brunt wrote:

"The work requires its spectator to walk by it, so that the process of looking at it transpires in time. These dates and names are important. They specify individual sites but they also map the site specificity of the work as a whole. They are a kind of litany accompanying the viewer in his or her passage through the work."

Works from The Homely were shown in Flight Patterns, an exhibition curated by Connie Butler for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Homely evolved into an exhibition initiated by City Gallery Wellington and shown at the Sarjeant Gallery and Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

Hipkins was nominated in the inaugural Walters Prize for this work.

This site-specific work was created at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

2000 small c-type prints depicting strands of liquorice were laid like raceway circuits around three gallery walls, accompanied by one large photograph of a skeletal Indian sculpture, Eurasia, and a video work showing plates of milk being slowly dyed blue or red with jelly crystals.

The installation was produced when Hipkins was in Dunedin as part of the gallery's Visiting Artist Programme.

The Habitat is a series of 72 silver gelatin prints, hung in a single line as a frieze, that take late modern and Brutalist buildings in New Zealand university campuses as their subject.

Hipkins photographed details of buildings' interiors and exteriors, and printed the resulting images on expired photo paper, producing images that were often blurred, under or over-exposed, too high or too low in contrast: the opposite of 'professional' architectural photographs.

The Habitat was first shown at the Adam Art Gallery and Artspace in Auckland.

The Crib is a multi-part photogram work, originally displayed as a 20 metre-long frieze.

As with numerous other works, such as The Field, the photograms are made by exposing sheets of photographic paper over with polystyrene balls have been laid.

This work, made up of 100 individual c-type prints of painted and glued-together hemispherical polystyrene blobs, was made for the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennale and then re-shown at the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland.

Curator Robert Leonard wrote of this work:

"Geometric yet organic, the blobs resemble at once alien pods, igloos, pup tents, breasts, the curvaceous hills and mud pools of his native New Zealand, and bacteria. The psychedelic colour scheme is both candied and toxic; we could be staring into a lava lamp, perhaps furthering a boudoir subtext. There’s no reference for scale. The work could imply a macroscopic view (an imperialist invasion, a commune of hippie drop-outs in their geodesic domes, or a high-tech off-world encampment on a weirdly hued planet) or a microscopic one."