An ostensibly heavyweight piece on show at Dunedin Public Art Gallery is a monument to its collectors, writes Lauren Gutsell.
The Dunedin Public Art Gallery's collection is predominantly made up of permanent holdings; works that are owned by the city of Dunedin.
The collection also includes a significant body of work that is held at the gallery on long-term loan.
These works are stored, cared for and exhibited at the gallery but are owned by generous collectors external to the institution.
A significant group of these works on long-term loan are owned by Wellington-based art collectors Jim and Mary Barr.
The gallery has had a relationship with the Barrs since 1997, when they generously offered 120 works to the gallery on long-term loan and gave 30 works to the gallery's permanent collection.
Since then, as their private collection shifts and grows, there have been periodic changes and additions to both the gallery's long-term loan and permanent collections.
One of the gallery's current exhibitions, "Light switch and conduit: The Jim Barr and Mary Barr Collection'', celebrates their collecting; and while this is not a body of work that is held on long-term loan, it highlights what they have been acquiring in recent years and their ongoing support of New Zealand artists.
"Light switch and conduit'' includes artists who, as part of their practice, consider the formal and conceptual potential of space. Fiona Connor's work hovers between perception and reality, the original and the imitation.
The lines between public and private space are often reframed and disrupted through her sculptural and architectural interventions.
Stairs in Series (2008) is a replica of the stairway in the office block where Jim Barr and Mary Barr were living at this time.
At face value the work seems monumental: tons of concrete, timber and steel.
In reality, polystyrene and paint replace structural materials, pulling us into Connor's ruse.
Stairs in Series provides the Barrs with a movable trace or record from an earlier time in their lives; replicating not only an element of their domestic past but also taking that memory and location, removing its function and memorialising it in a sculptural form.
