03/06/2026
Works by Meg Maguire in "Unreal Canterbury," on now at Eastside Gallery until 20 June. The exhibition brings together 11 artists whose works tilt the familiar, unsettle the expected, and reimagine the region.
Meg writes, "North Canterbury is a landscape shaped by irrigation, pivots, stopbanks and managed water systems. Rivers are redirected, floodplains controlled, and ground once defined by seasonal instability increasingly ordered into permanence. The geometry of those systems now sits so naturally within the landscape that it can almost feel inevitable.
Yet beneath that order sits a quieter unease. The land carries both abundance and exhaustion at the same time. Dryness, distance and silence become part of its atmosphere. Familiar places begin to feel altered; not ruined, but slowly estranged from older rhythms and meanings that are difficult to fully name."
Curator’s Note: "Just as water threads its way through this exhibition, so does its absence. Once again the fragility of the “clean and green” message is exposed. Throughout, the Minotaur - a figure who has witnessed millennia of human endeavours - stands as a quiet observer of our folly. These works hold a distinct sense of unease and we can feel the pressure of a place absorbing more than it can reasonably carry."
Canterbury appears as a place both real and slipping: braided rivers and devastating floods sit alongside scorched and ravaged earth; the land – and our identity – is staked and challenged. Familiar touchstones become strange and alien. Do we recognise ourselves in the messaging of a clean, green landscape and a shiny, rebuilt city, or does the lived reality tell a different story?
Across painting, sculpture, photography, audio visual, textile and monoprints, the exhibition invites viewers to consider not only what this place is, but what it has been, what it might become, and the versions of it we carry within us.
Artists: Cakkie Lou, Dusty Urchin, Joe Furniss, Judy Rogers, Meg Maguire, Milly Brown, Olivia Mercer, Ros Huppert, Ross Ellen, Sarah Brown and Tom McCone.
Floor talks with the Curator will take place every Saturday at 11am throughout the show.
All welcome, free parking onsite.
Location: Linwood Village, 388 Worcester St, Christchurch (free parking & entry)
Open: Wed-Thu: 11am-5pm | Fri-Sat: 10am-5pm
We offer 11 weekly classes & activities, run exhibitions and events in Eastside and the Mini and hire our spaces for arts activities and events evenings and weekends.
We are committed to artist development through our exhibition programme and community development via participation in our creative spaces.
We have 8 open call shows for local artists in 2026. In the last financial year we exhibited the work of 384 local artists.
More info: villageartscentre.org.nz
