The original edition was produced in 2015 for Open Book, an exhibition curated by Shelly Jacobson at RM Gallery. Only eight copies were made.
Ten years later, long out of print, the book still feels current given recent geopolitical and climate events. The images haven’t been revised. If anything, the world around them has shifted—or come into sharper focus. What once seemed distant now reads more directly. The same conditions persist: conflict, spectacle, excess. All still there, just harder to look past.
The photographs were made over two decades (1992–2013), largely during overseas travel. They move through art museums, tourist sites, and shopping destinations—spaces of display and controlled encounter. Ruins, paintings of war, natural history museum dioramas, the Paris catacombs and scenes of retail excess sit alongside staged grandeur of Caesars Palace. A couple of images made in Aotearoa New Zealand and a selection of public-domain artworks are folded into the sequence.
The title, Et In Arcadia Ego, points to the classical reminder that death is present even in paradise. There is no single subject, only an accumulation: images of images, histories already framed, realities already mediated.
Original publication date 2015, reissued May 2025 Softcover | singer sewn | 44 pages Second printing 100 copies
A compilation of 12 black and white photographs from Brendan’s walking and road trip journeys. From January to July 2025.
Brendan has been photographing in the Whanganui / Manuwatu and lower North Island area since he moved back to live in Whanganui in the 2020’s.
He was the A Gallery, 85 Glasgow artist in residence during October 2020.
“I took this opportunity to reconnect to the place I lived during the early to mid 1990’s. Most of that time was spent between Spriggens Park where my Father was manager of the Marist U21 and senior team and checking the North Mole to see if it was calm enough to cross so we could take the boat out. I wanted to return and explore my childhood memories of places and document the change………if any.”
This Zine is an update of his ongoing journey – photographs from the first half of the 2025. His gentle and steady assured photographic chronicling of a place in time.
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Publication date: August 2025 Softcover | A5 Zine | 28 pages Edition of 30
The title of this new book of AI photographs is a fusion of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Anthropology, the study of humanity.
AInthropology uses AI-generated imagery to explore the ethical issues and inherent biases in technology. In the process it reveals a glimpse of AI’s take on humanity.
The work sounds an alarm about the future of photography and human authenticity in an AI-dominated age. The text-to-image ‘photographs’ from 2024 are intended as an historical record of the time when AI technology first became widely available.
These AI images are effectively stolen identities and synthetic histories that seduce and mislead. They are published as evidence of human misadventure in allowing AI to unwind our reality. AInthropology is an anti-AI statement that builds on the themes in ‘Legacy’ (2024). The book includes a warning and sealed section as content may offend.
Golden Enterprise:New Zealand Chinese Merchants 1860s-1970s by Phoebe H. Li Published by Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust.
Commissioned by the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust, Golden Enterprise offers a compelling re-examination of New Zealand Chinese history from the 1860s to the 1970s, focusing on the pivotal role of Cantonese merchants.
These early entrepreneurs not only facilitated Chinese immigration but also shaped the identity of Chinese New Zealanders within the broader context of New Zealand’s shifting relationships with China, Britain, and the wider world. Drawing on extensive archival research in both Chinese and English sources, Phoebe H. Li illuminates the merchants’ transnational business and social networks, providing fresh perspectives on Chinese migration to the South Pacific.
This richly illustrated volume combines in-depth historical analysis with vivid human stories, complemented by a stunning collection of paintings and photographs. With its accessible style, Golden Enterprise appeals to both academic readers and those with a general interest in New Zealand and Chinese diaspora histories.
Phoebe H. Li holds a PhD from the University of Auckland and was a research fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She is currently an independent historian. Her prior publications include A Virtual Chinatown: The Diasporic Mediasphere of Chinese Migrants in New Zealand (Brill, 2013), Recollections of a Distant Shore: New Zealand Chinese in Historical Images (co-authored with John B. Turner, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2017) and some journal articles and book chapters. She was the principal curator of the acclaimed photographic exhibition Being Chinese in Aotearoa, hosted by the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the Waitangi Treaty Ground Museum, and the New Zealand Portrait Gallery (2017-2020).
Designed by Rim Books, Golden Enterprise features full-colour illustrations, encased in a quarter cloth-bound hardcover, offering both a visual and intellectual feast.
Longlisted for 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Illustrated Non Fiction category.
Uprooted: a handbook of levitating flowers and other fashionable nonsense by Fiona Lascelles
What if… the internet was soil, what flowers would grow?
A speculative piece of fiction that is part photography, is definitely sci-fi, could be used as a handbook, recants the ordeals of a 1950s plant breeder who grows species given to her from travellers to outer space (found on Wikicommons), performs acts of flower propagation via the active nourishment of words and contains magician’s coding.
Uprooted is a ramble across multiple worlds both real and imagined. At its core a reframing of plant taxonomy from a poetic perspective, entertaining the notion that a poetic understanding of the world is as viable a convention as one of argument and reason.
A process condensing research and readings, visual exploration, observation, curation and creating connections, play and critique; Ursula le Gruin refers to this as composting, a fitting analogy for the creative process. In the end the work became more than poetic fancy, rather a handbook of provocation.
Uprooted is a reflection on what philosopher Donna Harraway would see as a statement on the blurring of species identity politics. The accompanying texts and quotes throughout the book affirm the problem of the hierarchy of being: machine over plant, human over machine. Here, the plant speaks back.
Concept, design, production // Fiona Lascelles
Photography // Fiona Lascelles AI images created using personal photographs in midjourney and re-edited/composed in Photoshop. Coding created in codepal.ai and edited. AI plant names initially generated in fantasynamegenerators.com and re-edited.
Legacy – Portraits of the Greats by Jon Carapiet AI photographs of contemporary and historical figures
This book comprises still images captured from AI reanimation of pictures of the living and dead.
It includes iconic contemporary portraits of today’s most rich and powerful people which were first exhibited as large-scale prints and now, as pop up on-line.
Also included are classical portraits of historical figures long dead.
These anti-AI photographs represent the eternal moment and serve as memento mori in a new age.
Whether you like it or not, the age of AI is here.
In his latest exhibition Legacy, photographer Jon Carapiet uses AI technology to reanimate current well known and powerful figures, creating the sense of a time machine.
“AI has often been used to bring back to life images of the deceased, but Legacy takes this concept to propel audiences to a hypothetical future; encouraging contemplation and meditation on the current state of the world, as if it were the past.” From Culture 101, RNZ, 12:45 pm on 26 November 2023.
Stopped Short: Writings on Len Lye 1977-2017 Wystan Curnow Published by Bouncy Castle and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery|Len Lye Centre, with generous support from the Len Lye Foundation, Pollen Contemporary Art Foundation, and Grant Kerr.
For five decades, Wystan Curnow has been an advocate for—and authority on—the works of filmmaker and sculptor Len Lye. Alongside his friend and sometime collaborator Roger Horrocks, Curnow has championed the Aotearoa New Zealand–born artist’s work and driven its growing popular and critical recognition. Stopped Short gathers Curnow’s key writings on Lye. The first half centres on his discovery of Lye’s work in New York; the second explores its repatriation to Lye’s homeland where the establishment of the Len Lye Foundation and a dedicated Len Lye Centre in Ngāmotu New Plymouth has cemented Lye’s significance within Aotearoa New Zealand art history. Each half is introduced by Curnow, reflecting back on his earlier writings. In addition to offering a wealth of insights into Lye’s work, Stopped Short is also a study in reception, meditating on Lye’s place in world art, his place in Aotearoa New Zealand art, and the shifting relationship between them.
Len Lye (1901–80) is known for his dazzling experimental films and kinetic sculptures—parallel expressions of his desire to create an art of motion. He also made paintings and photograms (cameraless photographs)—and wrote. Born in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Lye spent time in Australia and Sāmoa in the early 1920s, before working his passage to London in 1926. There he became part of the modern-art scene, exhibiting with the Seven and Five Society and in the 1936 Internationalist Surrealist Exhibition.
He made his first film, Tusalava, in 1929 and went on to make films for the GPO Film Unit and Crown Film Unit utilising a variety of experimental techniques, often painting directly on film. In 1944 Lye moved to New York to work for the newsreel The March of Time. In the 1950s he began making films by scratching directly into black-leader film stock, and, in the late 1950s and 1960s, he developed motorised kinetic works he coined tangible motion sculptures. Examples are held in US collections such as the Whitney Museum of Americal Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; and Berkeley Art Museum.
Shortly before his death in 1980, Lye and his supporters established the Len Lye Foundation, based at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu New Plymouth, which continues to promote Lye’s work and to realise his kinetic sculptures. The new century has seen a growing international interest in Lye with solo shows at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, in 2000; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2001; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, in 2009; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 2010; The Drawing Centre, New York, in 2014; and Museum Tinguely, Basel, in 2019. The Govett-Brewster opened its dedicated Len Lye Centre in 2015.
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Wystan Curnow is Aotearoa New Zealand’s most eminent contemporary art critic. His internationalist perspective was shaped by living in the United States in the 1960s, where he was exposed to modernist painting and conceptual art. In the 1970s he became the house critic for the burgeoning post-object art scene centred on Jim Allen’s Sculpture Department at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, and began writing extensively on Colin McCahon, Billy Apple and Len Lye. Through his writing and curating, Curnow has raised the global profile of New Zealand artists and local awareness of and interest in expatriate artists, creating a more porous, complex idea of New Zealand art. In addition to being a regular contributor to journals and catalogues, he has written books on Immants Tillers (1998) and Stephen Bambury (2000), and has co-edited several books on Lye, including Figures of Motion (1984), Len Lye (2009), and The Long Dream of Waking (2018). A collection of his writings, The Critic’s Part, was published in 2014, and another of his writings on Billy Apple, Sold on Apple, in 2015. Curnow received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in non-fiction in 2018. He has been a trustee of the Len Lye Foundation since 2003. He lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Publication date: April, 2024 Flexicover | 180 x 235 x 18mm | 208 pages | ISBN 978-0-473-67853-1
Always song in the water: an ode to Moana Oceania by Gregory O’Brien
Always song in the water is an imaginative exploration of Aotearoa’s oceanic environment. This is the new, expanded edition of the now out-of-print 2019 book of the same title. The new exhibition and its accompanying book celebrates—in images, words and sound—our connectedness with the wider Pacific region, its peoples, flora, fauna and the expansive waters which both inspire and define us.
It is 11 years since the New Zealand Maritime Museum held the ground-breaking exhibition ‘Kermadec—Nine Artists in the South Pacific’, curated and co-ordinated by Gregory O’Brien, with Bronwen Golder of the Pew Environment Group. The new exhibition and this book Always song in the water returns to the themes, ongoing concerns and unresolved issues of the earlier project. In essence, the 2011 Kermadec voyage never ended. O’Brien and the other artists who voyaged to Rangitāhua Raoul Island on HMNZS Otago never really disembarked from the ship that took them north. They think of themselves as still out there, on the ocean, absorbing its energy, listening to its oceanic songs and confronting the environmental issues which have only increased in urgency over the ensuing decade.
Always song in the water— explores such topics as whale surveying, cultural connections across the Pacific, the need for ocean sanctuaries (such as the proposed Kermadec one) and the multi-layered history of Polynesian and European societies in Oceania. As well as including works and words by O’Brien and the other ‘Kermadec’ artists, this expanded edition features many new and commissioned works by leading artists including Chris Charteris, Shona Rapira Davies, Yuki Kihara, John Walsh and others. The book and the new exhibition celebrates Moana Oceania as a site of immense poetic and artistic potential. At the same time, it acknowledges that the region is facing issues of over-fishing, pollution and global warming. It returns to the originating theme of the need for ocean sanctuaries. ‘Always song in the water’ speaks of the need for better understanding, and a closer relationship with the ocean and everything it contains. It reminds us that the imagination and the arts have a crucial role to play in our evolving relationship with Moana Oceania.
Always song in the water – Art inspired by Moana Oceania, an exhibition at the New Zealand Maritime Museum Hui Te Ananui A Tangaroa, curated by Gregory O’Brien and Jaqui Knowles, is on from 24 August – 29 February 2024
Card-cover with flaps, section-sewn PUR glued | 296 pages 240mm x 175mm Portrait, numerous colour illustrations ISBN 978-0-473-68102-9 Published by New Zealand Maritime Museum Hui Te Ananui a Tangaroa
Dad, Pete, Opa. Tim J. Veling XYZ book (Lisbon) edition
“I have been admitted to hospital. Please don’t worry, but call me when you can. Lots of love, D,P,O.”
It was always how he signed off; shorthand for Dad, Pete, Opa. Tim J. Veling would soon learn his father had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer with an estimated three months to live. The rug was suddenly pulled out from under his feet.
D,P,O is a record of those last, precious months. The photographs are testament to not only the grief that father and son worked through together, but more importantly the love and admiration they shared; an account of the inevitable slowing of one life set to a backdrop of a new life and relationships thriving. Intensely moving in its unflinching intimacy and honesty, D,P,O reminds us that while death comes to us all, we must live in the present and treasure deeply the company of people we hold dear. For within those that remain, love and life endure. Tim J. Veling, Dad, Pete, Opa.
Original project outline in website Place in Time: The Christchurch Documentary Project.
Clinic of Phantasms: Writings 1994-2002 by GiovanniIntra Edited by Robert Leonard Foreword by Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell Introduction by Andrew Berardini
“Everything you read about Los Angeles is true. The city adapts to its own mythology. It’s such a ludicrously discussed place that I always feel slightly idiotic in my attempts to produce a serious discourse about it. Raves in the desert, however, are superb. And ecstasy is a great drug. Also, if you hadn’t heard, music sounds better when you’re high. And the desert surrounding LA is wondrous.” — Giovanni Intra, LA Politics
Artist, gallerist, and writer Giovanni Intra’s inventive approach to art writing provides a guide to the New Zealand and Los Angeles art scenes of his era.
Before his early death in 2002, Giovanni Intra enjoyed a rollercoaster ride through the art world. He was an artist and gallerist — cofounding two legendary galleries, the artist-run space Teststrip in Auckland and China Art Objects Galleries in Los Angeles — as well as a writer. Clinic of Phantasms provides a guide to the New Zealand and Los Angeles art scenes of the day, including texts on key artists from New Zealand (John Hurrell, Fiona Pardington, Denise Kum, Ava Seymour, Ann Shelton, Gavin Hipkins, Daniel Malone, and Slave Pianos) and Los Angeles (Charles Ray, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Dave Muller, Evan Holloway, John McCracken, and Julia Scher). What makes Intra’s work of enduring significance is his inventive approach to art writing, which was informed by his interest in punk, surrealism, and Daniel Paul Schreber, the famous case study in paranoia and hallucination. This volume features writing on Intra from Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell, Andrew Berardini, Roberta Smith, Tessa Laird, Will Bradley, Joel Mesler, and Robert Leonard.
Clinic of Phantasms is an invaluable compendium of writings, and having an opportunity to read them is a gift. The mad intelligence of Intra, and the love he generated in others, shine through. The volume is a gesture of respect by a group of people joining forces to gather the texts, contribute the introductions and bring the project to life in a beautiful way. —Jennifer Bornstein in Contemporary Hum
Cover: photograph by Monty Adams Allannah wears Studded Suit by Giovanni Intra, 1994. Styled by Kirsty Cameron and Rachel Churchward.
Card-cover with flaps, section-sewn PUR glued | 240 pages 235mm x 182mm Portrait, B&W illustrations ISBN 978-1-63590-165-8 Published by Bouncy Castle and Semiotext(e).
“Everything you read about Los Angeles is true. The city adapts to its own mythology. It’s such a ludicrously discussed place that I always feel slightly idiotic in my attempts to produce a serious discourse about it. Raves in the desert, however, are superb. And ecstasy is a great drug. Also, if you hadn’t heard, music sounds better when you’re high. And the desert surrounding LA is wondrous.” — Giovanni Intra, LA Politics