When the gallery moved from High St in Auckland to Upper Queen St at the end of 2014, I swapped a view through a gap between buildings for a vantage point above a leafy pocket of the Symonds Street Cemetery.
The room on the fourth floor of Peter Beaven’s 1965 Canterbury Arcade looked west over a few remaining corrugated iron roofs to an architectural collage on the other side of Queen St. From left to right, it took in a row of buildings from the Gothic turret of the 1929 Auckland Electric Power Board building to the 1988 gleaming bronze mirror Fay Richwhite Tower. The strip was once home to His Majesty’s Theatre and includes a weirdly textured 1974 building on the corner of Wynyard St. Occasionally, the façade of the Colonial Mutual Life Building was decorated by a lone pink bath towel hung from a high-up window.
Moving uptown meant coming down a few storeys, a verdant east-facing vista and a new set of textures. A long oak limb encrusted in creeper traverses the space like a scaly dragon. On the ground the staccato pecking of birds contrasts the movements of rats who slip around the cemetery as if on roller skates.
One day a group of architecture students appeared outside the window to be instructed about this rare patch of city topography largely unaltered by human habitation. What lumps and bumps remain are survivors of 19th-century burials and 20th-century motorway earthworks, which led to the reinterment of more than 4000 bodies.
Many visitors ask about ghosts. If there are any, they are quiet, patient types, undisturbed by preschool boys gleefully shrieking their way down the slopes on yellow-and-red plastic motorbikes.
In September the oak trees burst into limey profusion. A gallery is a point-of-view business, but the effort to attain a perspective is invariably rewarded by its transformation into another. A view is a shifting thing in the same way as a painting is to Philip Guston: “The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic.”
Anna Miles Gallery
10/30Upper Queen St, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
annamilesgallery.com
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