Chris Pole
Christchurch based artist Chris Pole completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in 2002, and was awarded the Vision Culture Residency at Shalini Ganendra Fine Arts in Kuala Lumpur in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Crossover’ at Warwick Henderson Gallery in Auckland; ‘Relative Locations’ 2019 and ‘Otehake’ 2022 both at PGgallery192, Christchurch; and ‘Crooked Spur’ an installational exhibition of paintings, video and soundscape at Ashburton Art Gallery, 2023/24.
Pole’s practice shows a commitment to the investigation of both landscapes and cityscapes, using his own photographs as a starting point, but disrupting the spaces depicted to reveal the vagueness of human perception and invoke notions of falsehood and fragility. As Felicity Milburn explains, “By adopting an abruptly flattened perspective, Pole reframes a meticulously rendered cityscape as an oscillating wall of pattern and texture…As his painted city surges in front of us, it seems ready to break apart into fragments of pure colour, forming a strangely dislocating threshold that has as much to do with imagination and memory as with visual fidelity”
Exhibitions:
Otehake, 2022
Relative Locations, 2019