Please join us for opening night
Michael Morley
Nick Harte
Aids for Black Magick
Sounds
5-6pm Mercedes Cambridge (Nick Harte) Adversary album premiere
6-7Pm Gate (Michael Morley)
Friday February 19
5PM
Recent paintings and sound
Please join us to preview
The Absurds
Hannah Joynt
Opening Night
Friday January 29
5PM
runs to February 17
“The absurd represents the convergence between the sense of alienation and the yearning for unity” Albert Camus
Please join us to preview our final exhibition for 2020
Campbell Patterson
Cold Lake
Friday December 4
5PM
Campbell Patterson was Artist in Residence at McCahon House in 2015 and awarded the University of Otago Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 2017. He currently resides in Dunedin. We are excited to be exhibiting a selection of his most recent works alongside several from the last seven years of his practice.
Runs to December 24
Untitled, Dunedin Landscape, May 2020
Jay Hutchinson
Hutchinson’s latest work follows on from his exhibition ‘On the way to work’ which showed at Olga in 2019. The previous exhibition consisted of 20 small hand embroidered works based on the trash Hutchinson found during his journeys to work. This work however is a singular piece that echoes Hutchinson’s fascination with psychogeography, the forgotten and discarded. Hutchinson conceived this work to follow the current show at OLGA ‘The Yallop and Smith Memorial Exhibition’ by utilising the damaged walls from the installation of over 100 works.
Exhibition runs November 21 - 28
Please join us for a drink on Saturday the 28th of November for the exhibitions' closing event from 1pm for a performance from L$D Fundraiser, Morgan Oliver (Fuck Chairs) and Jay Hutchinson performing together for the first time as Barnes, Hutchinson and Oliver.
Exhibition closing event
Saturday November 28
1pm
OLGA
32 Moray Place
Dunedin
The Yallop & Smith Memorial Exhibition 2020
Opening with a shared lunch
Saturday October 31
12PM
“The painting above (right), was the last painting completed by my friend Des Smith. It was based on his favorite placemat ( left) featuring the art work “Crossing the Bealy, 1882”, by artist John Gully. The placemat sat next to the board he was painting on the easel in his bedroom in 2006. Des worked on the painting for about six months slowly building up the composition in thin transparent layers. This was a process he had learnt at the Dunedin School of Art in 1937 where he studied painting alongside Colin McCahon. I visited often during this time as I lived across the road. Des would often usher me into a room to show me his progress on the painting… before Des’s partner Ray would pull me away, taking the placemat with him as he needed it for its intended use. Ray was always concerned that as an art student, I wouldn’t be eating enough. Ray was always making fuss and is still one of the best hosts I have ever met.”
Jay Hutchinson
This exhibition is based on the enduring concept of friendship, community and inclusion. A chance to remember and celebrate the lives of two good friends, Ray Yallop (b.1934, d.2010) and Des Smith (b.1920 d.2009). The Exhibition is a salon installation in the style of their residence in Grant Street, Dunedin, New Zealand. Cluttered artworks of all kinds would vanish into a tapestry of colour, an endless sea of style, medium and form. Historical oil paintings would sit alongside bright coloured sketches, framed-photographs and quirky sculptures either given by the artists, purchased from local galleries or just picked up at bargain prices from local fairs. The collection represented an endless expanding community of artists that would meet at ‘Des and Ray’s Place’ at least once a year for unveilings of new works, birthday celebrations and even a wedding. It was a place that felt like home, where all were always welcome, and accepted for who they were.
The exhibition includes artwork by those that knew Des and Ray and those that possibly would have…don’t forget to sign the book
A joint Olga and agallerypresents.com exhibition
Interested in exhibiting in the Yallop and Smith Memorial Exhibition?
Please drop your artwork to OLGA before October 29
The exhibition will include artwork by Desmond Smith, Gary McMillian, Ruth Cleland, Robert Scott, Jenny Hjertquist, Catherine Cocker, Philip Madill, Eliot Coates, Michael Morley, Peter McLaren, Philip Jarvis, Sam Ovens, Craig Easton, Marion Mertens, Mark Rayner, Paul Rayner, Hannah Joynt, Murray Eskdale, L$D Fundraiser, Anna Muirhead, Katrina Thomson, Dallas Henley, Marilyn Webb, Luke Hancock, William Field, Ben Webb, Marco Dahlberg, Phillip James Frost, Celia Morgan, John Francis, Sharon Singer, Harley Jones, Holly Aitchison, Raimo Kuparinen, Lynda Cullen, Pamela Brown, Motoko Kikkawa, Justin Spiers, Rebecca Hasselman, Simon Attwooll, Julia Hutchinson, Miss Cherry Pie, Michael Lamb, Taarn Scott, Shaded Skull, Jonathan Waters, DDDCCXO, Hamish Jones, Ed Richie, Marion Mertens, Kathryn McCully, Jake Medary, Jay Hutchinson, Anya Sinclair, Michael Greaves, Iain Cheesman, Anita Desoto, Jonathan Waters, Esther Bosshard, Annemieke Ytsma, and many more to come.
Runs to November 20
Mark Rayner
Paul Rayner
Philip Jarvis
Opening
Friday
October 9
5PM
The return of the Rayner Brothers Circus
with special guest Philip Jarvis
Welcome to the low-brow, high-art world of Whanganui
and Dunedin based artists Philip Jarvis, Mark Rayner and
Paul Rayner's sculptures, ceramics, photographs
and latch hook rugs.
Exhibition runs to October 28.
Do not miss this exhibition
Anya Sinclair
Everything Must Go
Opening
Friday
September 11
4-7PM
Please join Anya for the opening of
Everything Must Go
A Spring Celebration at OLGA
Note, due to Covid 19 Level 2 restrictions the exhibition opening will be held over an extended period.
Visit anytime between 12 and 7PM on Friday
Drinks and nibbles with Anya between 4 and 7.
A maximum of 10 people in the gallery at any time.
Exhibition runs to October 1
Adrienne Martyn
Artist Portraits 1981-89
Opening
August 7
5PM
Please join us for the opening
Henry Turner
Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day
Opening
July 3
5PM
Henry Turner
Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day
Opening
July 3
5PM
Please join us for the opening
Metiria Turei
Hiwa
Opening
June 19
5PM
Sandra Bushby
Rachel Zanders
Selected Work

Rachel Zanders Together
Woodcut print
42 x 59.5 cm
2016-2018
Sandra Bushby/Rachel Zanders: Impulse-Interval/ Accent-Breath
“One winter, trying to appease myself, I whipped my bed every
afternoon with my uniform belt. ... whipping the bed with a belt, like a creature demented!—and I often began half-heartedly, but I did it daily, after school, as a desperate discipline.” That was Annie Dillard, using a simple structure to turn ir- ritation or elevation into an energy field. Managing her compulsions, spacing the ungovernable. Turning irritation or elevation into structure. That’s right, that’s painting, that’s writing, that’s homework, that’s making lots of things; finding ways of running the workshops of feeling. Project managing the sentiment. It’s the same as tried and true folk art, making and joining, crafting. Plaiting, putting in seams and darts, finishing off with the right kind of stitch, feeling the fabric between the fingers. Putting things in a sort of order, doing it for a long time each day. Allowing a flourish that only comes with practice. Annie’s desperate discipline applies to both Sandra’s and Rachel’s conjoint art for Olga. The tempos differ. What painting is about and is. And its being about is not translation, it’s re-presentation, it’s round about, round-abouting, going back over, falling into further relentless circling that shifts along by nudgings considered and nudgings imposed; worried currents that won’t let go that go away but won’t. The wayward shopping trolley with jammed front wheel. Steering catawampus oblique; it’s repeated presentation with slurs. With angles. And slants. Translation is alright too when ‘recessed’, recessional temporal loops diminishing as spatial nesting that never gets anywhere except differently, determinedly. This this that then that glissando, to arpeggiotic up or sideways climbing. Hermit crabs form “a hermit crab chorus line” waiting in line for accommodation changes in community preparedness. It’s unstoppable, but it stops and starts and jitters along—now slow, next furious, now faster than zip stitches or Quick Unpick tooling with tiny
red pellets, “Faster than fairies, faster than witches” “Fly[ing] as thick as driving rain ... Painted stations whistle by.” It’s manic it’s calming; it’s ornamented and reserved; retiring, compulsive, and convulsed by compulsions. See Sandra’s stone pillows, such nubilous lift, ornate play, fadings away in tumulose air, spaced and blurred. Jacob’s ladders accreting in reduced circumstances; bricks in the sky that can be counted often, mineral red slabs stacking, inferred if not, read off impressions. She sometimes has pelagic or bosky dreams in a small garden. Here it’s brick accents, brick steps ascending and descending on ladders in serial
heavens. Necessarily as an inexhaustible elegant step, counter-stepped dance display, Rachel shows sonic clatter, mineral clitter, rolling down and along, braced and end-stopped, nubs and capped staves, jointed continuums set in motion like games on the floor. Skewed formations with minds of their own. Primary school stick games on mats with time-clapped exchanges. Throw catch tap, spin swap and return. Glitches, self-notching task setting accents each session.
“An arpeggiotic thought escapes like an uncanny configuration of rocks. A slow blink between moments feels too serene to be coincidence.” But there’s much co-incidence; there’s also more. Like Marianne Moore’s “Hurry, worry, unwary/... never vary”, “It’s all like the never-ending/Ferris-wheel ascending/picket-fenced pony-rides (ten cents).” Or her favoured Swedish carriage, the “dolphin-graceful” carriage cart: “all/needles: from a green trunk, green shelf/on shelf fanning out by itself./The deft white-stockinged dance in thick-soled/shoes!” It’s Tristan Tzara’s “Cubist tinkle dance” performed on ladders.
With thanks to: Annie Dillard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Rundell, Animal Psi, Marianne Moore, Tristan Tzara
Allan Smith, February 2020
Sandra Bushby, Let it Bleach Blue--
Oil on linen 45 x 30 cm, 2019
Oil on linen 45 x 30 cm, 2019