lunchtime confrontation

We will admit it was the men­tion of a freely down­load­able pod­cast com­ment­ary in this week’s Listen­er that drew us in. Some of us Wel­ling­tonis­tas are more geeky than oth­ers. But giv­en what seems to be the theme of the City Gal­lery’s latest exhib­i­tion, Aus­trali­an artist Patri­cia Pic­canini’s In Anoth­er Life (19 Feb­ru­ary to 11 […]

Synth Birds of Dawn: take two

Well, this par­tic­u­lar Wel­ling­tonista thought the Synth Birds of Dawn soun­ded great. Nic McGow­an and his two fel­low theremin play­ers waved their arms about half an hours worth of oth­­er-worldy noise mak­ing early on Tues­day morn­ing, cre­at­ing sounds that at times soun­ded like the gib­bon cries heard from the zoo in New­town every morn­ing, to […]

Synth Birds of Dawn

Res­id­ents of Island Bay, do not be alarmed. Those weird, spacey tones rever­ber­at­ing around your sub­urb next week will not be sig­nalling the impend­ing inva­sion of Wel­ling­ton by ali­ens, but will be, in fact, The Synth Birds of Dawn. Loc­al composer/producer Nic McGow­an is co-ordin­at­ing a three-piece theremin ‘band’, who will be loc­ated one-a-piece on […]

World of Wearable Arts

The World of Wear­able Arts extra­vag­anza draws closer every day, as can be seen with the excel­lent Kirks dis­play that Tom at Wel­lurb­an was so kind to pho­to­graph and upload to flickr. The show itself starts tomor­row (Fri 23 Sep), with the Awards even­ing at the Queens Wharf Event Centre, and sub­sequent shows on the […]

Whale tail no fluke

Ter­rible head­line pun lif­ted dir­ectly from the Hutt News, which this week reveals more about the man behind the fake whale tail that is cur­rently flip­ping and flap­ping amon­sts the waves in Wel­ling­ton Har­bour. Turns out Phil­lip Wad­ding­ton, a noted loc­al potrait artist, cre­ated the fake tail (made of bam­boo, inner tubes and black PVC) […]

The young Mephistopheles

Con­struc­tion wall, Wait­angi Park Ori­gin­ally uploaded by tani­wha. As keen observ­ers of the built envir­on­ment we note that Wel­ling­ton has its fair share of graf­fiti and graf­fiti artists. But someone Wel­ling­ton has that the oth­er homes of massed human­ity does not is Mephisto Jones. You’ve seen his work, even if you haven’t known who was […]

A flag for our time

A week­end trip to the out­er reaches of Wel­ling­ton­ist cov­er­age ended with a crack­ing vis­it to Pataka at Pori­rua and in par­tic­u­lar the com­pre­hens­ive and thought pro­vok­ing ‘Sym­bols of Sov­er­eignty’ series. Out­lining the extraordin­ary evol­u­tion of flags in New Zea­l­and this a series of five exhib­i­tions all with a flag theme: JACK OR BLACK – […]

The New Cool

The New Cool – an exhib­i­tion that cel­eb­rates the achieve­ments of some of New Zeal­and’s small but suc­cess­ful cre­at­ive com­pan­ies – star­ted this week at the Dowse Art Gal­lery out in the Hutt, and, hav­ing seen a wee sneak pre­view last week­end, as the final pre­par­a­tions were being put togeth­er, we can highly recom­mend get­ting […]

World Of WearableArt – models needed

The awe­some World Of Wear­ableArts is after more mod­els for the September/October shows. We at Wel­ling­ton­ist Towers rushed to the com­puters to sign-up only to dis­cov­er that the young ‘uns are eli­gible. The oldies still expect to see them parad­ing their par­tic­u­lar brand of funky stuff down the cat­walk rep­res­ent­ing all that’s hip about the […]

Avangard at the Railway Station

Just because the Fringe Fest­iv­al is over (and con­grats to all the win­ners at the Fringe Awards), does­n’t mean you can­’t still see some avant garde per­form­ance art on the streets. Oh no. We’ve already missed a couple of per­form­ances by Avangard – the pro-glam art band from Esto­nia – but I fully intend to […]