Wish You Were Here

Wish You Were Here

Artist Julia Holden transforms 5 paintings of present-day Christchurch into a city-wide Auckland billboard exhibition for the month of June.

“Art has had, and continues to have, a very important role to play in healing Christchurch’s quake-torn community. This project uses art to extend a connecting bridge between our shaky-town and New Zealand’s largest city.” Julia Holden.

Christchurch based artist Julia Holden has raised $5,000 through the Arts Foundation’s crowd-sourcing site, Boosted, to transform 5 of her oil paintings into a city-wide Auckland billboard exhibition. With the generous assistance from billboard companies Media5, iSite and APN the paintings will be installed in the first week of June, sites TBC.

The 5 billboard paintings were selected during a week-long exhibition of the works at GapFiller’s The Inconvenience Store at Cathedral Junction, Christchurch. Visitors to the Store were invited to vote on which paintings they felt best represented Christchurch as it is right now, and their votes determined which 5 paintings in the series of 10 were used.

“Artists have certainly employed billboards to present artworks before, but I don’t believe anyone has ever installed 5 at once. I am, in effect, claiming the whole city as my exhibition venue and getting painting out into the spaces where we work and live. This project honours the on-going, present-day reality of people living in this damaged city, and offers a unique way of calling positive attention to Christchurch. My hope is that this billboard campaign will gently remind people that we are still here, and encourage dialogue and connection with the wider New Zealand community.”

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