All Souls Carnival
Len Lye’s largest exhibition to date in New Zealand opened on the weekend that Rugby World Cup fever gripped the country, generated by the Cup’s 2011 opening match there. It also coincided with the Govett-Brewster Gallery’s (GBG’s) announcement that a further sizable donation meant that 80% of the required funds had been pledged for a Len Lye Centre to be built in New Plymouth, planned to open in 2014. Intended to nudge up against the gallery spaces and service areas of the existing GBG, Patterson Associates have already come up with an eye-catching architectural design for the new Centre, which will double the size of the art complex as a whole. Under the Directorship of Australian Rhana Devenport, the contemporary art mandate for the GBG means that New Plymouth increasingly attracts attention for its vital exhibition programming of both New Zealand and international artists. The Len Lye Centre will certainly reinforce this.
‘Len Lye: All Souls Carnival’ was launched, therefore, with tremendous optimism and anticipation for the future. The exhibition was selected by curator Tyler Cann, who, during his tenure of six years at the Len Lye Foundation (housed at GBG), conceived a number of insightful shows and associated events. Notably, these include the exhibition ‘LEN LYE’ (2009) at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, and production of an associated book edited by Cann together with Wystan Curnow. For ‘All Souls Carnival’, Cann selected work that covered the breadth of Lye’s career, from when he left New Zealand as a young maverick artist testing himself first in Sydney, followed by London and finally, from the mid-1940s, in New York, where he remained until his death in