The Golden Haze: Graham Fletcher

Graham Fletcher’s Samoan and European genealogy provides a constant interplay of disparities in his overall artistic practice. In this new body of work, Fletcher uses a selection of ethnographic objects collected throughout many of Captain James Cook’s voyages and reimagines these objects within ‘tasteful’ modern interiors in his continuing examination of the complex and dynamic relationship between the civilised and ‘primitive’, colonial and colonised, and the observers and the observed. This exhibition, entitled The Golden Haze, marks the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first landmark expedition to the Pacific. The inspiration for the title came after reading Roderick Cameron’s The Golden Haze: With Captain Cook in the South Pacific (1964) in which the author, between 1959 and 1961, retraced Cook’s voyages in the Pacific journaling his own personal experiences in contrast with those of Cook's.

Fletcher has a Doctorate of Fine Arts (Elam School of Fine Arts, 2010) and is currently a Senior Lecturer, Studio Coordinator of Painting at the Dunedin School of Art. His works are widely collected by private and public institutions, and last year the Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland held the largest survey of his works to date featuring over two decades of work titled The Third Space: Ambiguity In the Art of Graham Fletcher.