I’m excited to share details of my upcoming exhibition, Dead Man’s Block. This show is on for two hours only on April the 18th, 11-1pm. It’s at the New Lynn Community Centre in the Active Recreation Hall.
I’m very grateful to the indomitable Bronwyn Lloyd and Jack Ross for their accompanying texts and as ever the wonderful William Bardebes for fabrication, design and everything besides.
I hope if you live in Tāmaki you can make this show. 45 Totara Ave. There is loads of handy parking out the back and it’s right next to the train station and bus depot. Love to see you there!
Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail
– Gary Snyder
IThe little dog’s better
he’s with the monks now
Bronwyn assumed
I’d remember she told me
that the Buddhists walking
across the States
to raise awareness
had sent off their dog
to get his leg fixed
he’s glad to be back
he wagged his tailII
This morning John sent me
a link to a doco
about Cold Mountain
Han Shan
a poet who lived
1000 years ago
he may have been Taoist
or Buddhist
but was really just
a crazy old man
who scribbled poems on rocks
as the old lady said
he faded into the walls of his caveIII
In Hoffmann’s Mines of Falun
a sailor gives up the sea
after coming back from a voyage
to find his mother dead
the old man who lures him
to work underground
is a ghost
or a demon
or something like that
they both end up stoned
in veins of ore
IV
Cold Mountain this hermit
who gave up on life
to clamber up here
had nothing to teach
if you’ve nothing to learn
there are statues
of him and his buddies
they’re ugly and red
Red Pine laughed
when he saw them
the filmmaker asked him why
because he would have laughed
however he looked
The Way the Future Was. Ever since I first came across it, I've felt that the title of Frederick Pohl's mid-career memoir summed up the field of Science Fiction pretty exactly.
For all its emphasis on futuristic prediction and the pending triumphs of technology, SF (whether you read that acronym as "Science Fiction" or the more inclusive "Speculative Fiction") has always been an intensely nostalgic genre.
Other Worlds, curated by Andrew Henry & Renee Orr (19 February - 2 August 2025)
You feel it the moment you walk in the door of Other Worlds, the latest exhibition in the Rare Books Room at Auckland's Central City Library, an exploration of the "imaginative worlds of science fiction ... featuring books, magazines, comics and posters from Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections."
The curators' decision to focus on old SF magazine covers to create an immediate visual effect was an inspired one. The exuberance and inventiveness of the artists who illustrated these old pulp magazines was propelled not so much by aesthetic considerations as by the sheer strength of the competition.
They had to stand out against all the other possibilities on the newstand: the toney, uptown slicks; the plethora of True Crime and True Detective titles; and even the last few remaining shockers: the EC horror comics or Weird Tales - almost all of them equally attractive (or garish, depending on your taste).
And yet, look at this cover from the original run of Dune in Analog in the early 1960s. Has there ever been a more majestic rendition of a Sandworm in any of the subsequent book-covers or movies?
"Shai Hulud!" I found myself intoning as I saw it, "Bless the Maker and His water. May His passage cleanse the world." I am, as you may have gathered, an abject fan of the grandeur of Frank Herbert's conception, ever since I first read it more years ago than I care to mention ...
Fritz Lang, dir. Metropolis, music by Giorgio Moroder (1924 / 1984)
That's not all you see when you first go in, though. In accordance with that sense of nostalgia I mentioned above, there was an old flickering black-and-white movie being projected on the back wall: possibly the greatest SF movie ever made - certainly among the most influential - Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
It's a masterpiece no matter which version you watch it in (there are many - of varying lengths and degrees of completeness). It's probably a relic of having come of age in the 1980s, but I still can't get past the experience of first seeing it in full in the 1984 version scored by Giorgio Moroder.
Moroder colourised the scenes, which might sound sacrilegious if you didn't realise that that was how feature films were generally projected in the 1920s - just like those classical marble nudes we admire so much which were originally covered in brightly coloured paint by their creators.
Check it out for yourself at the youtube link above.
Which brings me to my next point. What exactly are we intended to take away from this assemblage of artefacts? Once you've got over the security blanket feeling of seeing so many old friends among the books displayed in the vitrines - Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - you begin to wonder about the rationale behind them.
Of course the standard themes are gestured towards: Robots and Monsters, Inner Worlds, the planet Mars ... these are a few of the labels included in the exhibition brochure. And, yes, artificial life and artificial intelligence are now subjects which impact on us everyday, as do the consequences of ignoring the ecological warnings of earlier SF.
“It’s a celebration of the imagination of writers and artists – of imaginative literature,” says Andrew Henry, Curator of Auckland Collections, Auckland Council Libraries.
“There’s a huge variety of other worlds that these writers have created, from outer space to cyberspace. We want to invite Aucklanders to come and check out science fiction’s early beginnings and how it’s progressed since then; to consider how this might be topical in the modern day and what some of the wildest predictions of technology have been – did they get it right? Come find out!”
Quite so. But in keeping with that invitation, I guess what excited me most about the show were the few, subversive signs it contained of a new lease of life for this now venerable genre.
It's not actually included in any of the vitrines, but I see that local author Gina Cole has been asked to come and speak about her work at one of the public programmes associated with the exhibition. When I first read her novel Na Viro a few years ago, I was hugely impressed by the skill with which it integrated both colonial and dystopian themes into a new construct she referred to as "Pasifikafuturism."
Building on her earlier collection Black Ice Matter (2017), Cole has expertly transposed some of the ideas behind the embattled concept of Afrofuturism to a Pacific context.
But it's the inclusion of works by Octavia Butler and that supreme maverick Samuel R. Delany in the cabinet marked "Colonisation" that gives us a possible lead towards seeing how these themes ought to stand front and centre in any consideration of the meaning of SF in Aotearoa now.
While neither of these authors felt exactly comfortable about the possible limiting implications of the term, there's no doubt that present-day Afrofuturism - and its offshoot, Africanfuturism - owe a great debt to their pioneering work in the SF genre. Nor did they shy away from controversy or cultural politics: the lifeblood of any engaged artform.
I'd like to see what's included here, then, as not so much a nostalgia-fest as a blueprint for further progress. Where do we go from here? For Gina Cole, that has meant conceiving of travel through space as the same leap into the unknown her ancestors undertook in setting out across the moana.
Or, as T. S. Eliot once said:
... the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
Emma Smith: "The second sun" (The Municipal Gardens, 2024) [images courtesy of the artist]
Bronwyn Lloyd will be hosting an exhibition
of recent paintings
by Emma Smith
at 6 Hastings Road
Mairangi Bay, Auckland
Saturday-Sunday 5-6 October
from 11am-4pm
Jack Ross's new collection of stories Haunts (Lasavia Publishing)
will be launched on the Saturday at 2pm
$30 cash or bank deposit (no EFTPOS)
ALL WELCOME
Refreshments provided
updates on Instagram: @lloyd.bronwyn
Emma Smith: "Living with caves" (The Municipal Gardens, 2024)
•
Haunts (Lasavia Publishing, 2024) Image: Graham Fletcher (by courtesy of the artist) / Design: Daniela Gast
Back cover blurb:
What do we actually mean by the word haunt? In this new set of stories inspired by the term, Jack Ross invokes a series of his favourite haunts via voices from the past, beginning with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and concluding with Emanuel Swedenborg. In between he visits with Irish ghost-story maestro Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, along with others ranging from James Joyce to H. P. Lovecraft – not to mention Scheherazade herself, creator / narrator of The 1001 Nights. Most importantly of all, perhaps, he tries to settle accounts with his own father, the architect of a vast entangled empire of native bush and weeds at the back of their suburban quarter-acre section in Mairangi Bay. The book ends with the novella Cartographies of the Afterlife, an exploration of the penumbra between life and death, based on accounts from recent visitors. In the immortal words of Bette Davis: ‘Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night.’
Jack Ross is the author of six poetry collections, four novels, and four books of short fiction. His previous collection, Ghost Stories (Lasavia, 2019), has been prescribed for writing courses at three local universities. He’s also edited numerous books, anthologies, and literary journals, including (most recently) Mike Johnson’s Selected Poems (2023).
•
Emma Smith: "The second to last" (The Municipal Gardens, 2024)
Artist's statement:
'Years ago, I lived in a downstairs flat with wide windows that let the night right into the room. There were white datura flowers with pink throats on the fence line. They hummed at dusk. For a long time I tried to paint them as they seemed utterly their own thing. The blooms became sails, became tents, ripped tarps, ropes whipping, planes noses, thick smoke, drones, white flags, stadium lights, search lights, anxious lanterns, distant fires, phosphorescence from below. These shapes still resist a final form and so too do the conditions about them. They are in scorched fields, floating in the dead air of space and falling in fiery plumes.’
Emma Smith was born in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa/ New Zealand in 1975. Smith currently teaches Contemporary Arts at Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland. Further information can be found at her website https://emmasmithtingrew.wordpress.com/.
•
Graham Fletcher: Ceramic Head [photo: Bronwyn Lloyd (4-10-24)
Jack & Bronwyn at the Haunts / Municipal Gardens launch [photo: Viv Stone (5-10-24)
Korero is a "collaborative exhibition illustrating a fusion between visual art and poetry. 20 artists from various disciplines select from 20 carefully chosen poems on the theme of conversation, to use as inspiration for their artwork. The artists include Ingrid Anderson, Lisa Benson, Kirsty Black, Chris Dennis, Sue Dick, Matt Moriarty, Dom Morrison, Emily Pauling, Clinton Philips, Kirsten Pleitner, Ramon Robertson, Mark Russell, Kate Sellar, Brendon Sellar, Shona Tawhiao, Emma Topping, Wayne Trow, Jana Wood and Nicola Wright."
One of the poems chosen for the exhibition by Siobhan Harvey and Melissa Elliot, the curators, was my piece "Except Once":
– Aren’t I always nice to you?
– Except once.
[Overheard in the Massey @ Albany Refectory]
tap’s still dripping, diesel generators roar
in shop doors, no money rolls
in, lumps of old essay sag
in plastic bags – I type out texts
from Penguin Books of European Verse. The water’s too cold for swimming.
Focus on externals: tick of death
in Irene’s stomach, Miriel’s scorched flesh,
brain-clots and blood-diseases, Julian’s sister
killed on Saturday night – I like to see
the islands in the gulf, driving down the long hill, ships floating down the sky.
(17/3/98)
So, as a result, Bronwyn and I drove over to the Uxbridge Creative Arts Centre in Howick last night for the opening of the show. And I'm very glad we did. We got to catch up with a number of friends we hadn't seen for a while: Sarah Broom, Riemke Ensing and Sonja Yelich among them. And we also got to meet the artist who'd created a work based on my poem, Kirsty Black.
Here we are in front of her painting, also entitled "Except Once":
And here's a more detailed view of the painting itself:
< [Kirsty Black: Except Once]
[Except Once (detail)]
I guess I should explain that the poem was written during the great Auckland blackout of 1998, when "diesel generators" were indeed roaring "in shop doors" up and down Queen Street, and the only lights one could see in the darkened city were traffic red, orange, greens. It was a strange and uncanny time, and an appalling number of people I knew seemed to be in pain and turmoil just then. There's a bit of a lift at the end, though, which I feel that Kirsty has picked up on in her transition from the dark blue at the bottom of her painting to the lighter, more life-affirming colours at the top of the frame.
It was very interesting to discuss her intentions with the piece with her. All in all, though her painting didn't win the $1,000 prize, I think it was a thoroughly worthwhile experience. I guess that's why I'm looking so smug in the picture below:
We had a really nice time! The weather was practically perfect (despite various naysaying weather prophets). We hung out with my brother Jim; my niece Catherine; Karl Chitham, whose collection the exhibition came from (I edited the catalogue, and wrote an introduction to it); and also David Howard, my fellow executor of Leicester Kyle's literary estate, from whom I collected the remainder of Leicester's papers.
Here are some pictures - mostly taken by Bronwyn, hence her absence from them, but also a few by David Howard (marked DH), as well as some by my brother Jim (marked JR):
Dunedin Landmarks:
[North East Valley]
[Literary plaques in the Octagon]
[The old synagogue, Moray Place]
[Posters for the show (DH)]
Gallery environs:
[Why do you want to go down there ...?]
['Cause there's a cool little gallery hidden in that alley ...]
