{"id":619876,"date":"2026-10-04T00:24:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-04T00:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/619876\/"},"modified":"2026-10-04T00:24:11","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T00:24:11","slug":"the-art-curator-who-wants-to-shake-up-the-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/619876\/","title":{"rendered":"The art curator who wants to shake up the city"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aaron Kreisler wants to interrupt your daily routine.<\/p>\n

As the newest managing curator at SCAPE Public Art in Christchurch, Kreisler wants artworks to make people stop and look.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there\u2019s a \u2018What is that?\u2019 moment, I think you\u2019ve achieved something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kreisler, 54, says his SCAPE role, which he juggles with his day job as head of creative and digital arts at Canterbury University, is to tap into the \u201cmoment that we\u2019re in\u201d and select works that represent it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m interested in civic space as a place for discussion.\u201d<\/p>\n

SCAPE\u2019s season starts at the end of October.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"STAY by Antony Gormley is a permanent piece commissioned by SCAPE in 2016. Photo: Supplied <\/p>\n

Kreisler says it is titled Waiting for the Tide and involves six artists. Sites for the artworks are still being selected, and the logistics of installing the works are being worked through.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople will see something that is unexpected, and they might not even be going to see SCAPE\u2019s work. It might just be something that interrupts their daily routine.\u201d<\/p>\n

The title references global political and social uncertainty \u2013 the sense that the world is running out of time or waiting for \u201csomething seismic\u201d to happen.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we\u2019re in a really interesting historical moment where there\u2019s a lot of uncertainty about, say, politics or our kind of social engagement with one another, what the future holds, the markers of the past, what we keep and what we remove.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a thing that allows you to think about the moment we\u2019re in, and just to speculate on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He knows some people will bristle at the cost. He also knows some will not like the artworks.<\/p>\n

But that, he says, is part of the point.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re also there to challenge people,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I\u2019m interested in is the discussions that come out of public art. Often the discussions can be quite heated.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about the rights of who places things within the public realm and the reaction of the audience to that, rightly or wrongly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"Tree Houses for Swamp Dwellers by Julia Morison was a permanent work commissioned by SCAPE in 2013. Photo: Supplied <\/p>\n

Kreisler has spent most of his life around art. He comes from an artistic family and got his first taste of the professional world as a high school student, interning at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.<\/p>\n

Both his parents, Tom and Lesley Kreisler, were involved in art. His father attended the Ilam School of Fine Arts alongside printmaker Barry Cleavin and pop artist Dick Frizzell during the 1960s, and was taught by prominent artists Bill Sutton and Rudolf Gopas.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father was an art teacher, and he was an artist. My mother was a \u2018home ec\u2019 teacher who eventually opened a gallery.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople like Bill Sutton would come up and stay at our house, as well as other artists and curators. So it\u2019s just always been there.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always been my life,\u201d he said of working in art.<\/p>\n

After high school, he studied art history at Otago University before completing a master\u2019s degree at Auckland University.<\/p>\n

While at Auckland, he heard a speech from then-Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines about finding a link between the university and the gallery.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe said, \u2018I\u2019m trying to find a bridge between the university and the art gallery\u2019, and I was pretty precocious, so I booked in to meet him the next week.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I said, \u2018I am your bridge\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"AKA ‘A HINA by S\u0113misi Fetokai Potauaine was commissioned and installed by SCAPE in 2019. Photo: Supplied <\/p>\n

He began working at Auckland Art Gallery\u2019s research library before becoming a curatorial assistant.<\/p>\n

In about 1997, Kreisler took a teaching job at the Waikato Technical Institute, where he set up and ran the polytechnic\u2019s RAMP Gallery.<\/p>\n

Before another teaching job at Massey University in 2002, Kreisler took a break from education to work on the set of The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise, buying plant materials for the movie\u2019s \u2018greens\u2019 department.\u00a0<\/p>\n

His father died during this time, and Kreisler had to take on management of his artist estate \u2013 preserving, cataloguing and administering artworks and archives \u2013 which was a steep learning curve.<\/p>\n

At Massey, Kreisler set up another gallery, The Engine Room.<\/p>\n

After relocating south, he became curator of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2006, where he produced more than 50 exhibitions.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"Mixed Feelings by Tony Cragg at Christ’s College for SCAPE’s 2018 show. Photo: Supplied <\/p>\n

By 2015, though, Kreisler thought it was time for a change and moved to Christchurch to be head of the Ilam School of Fine Arts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been this kind of authorial voice for the gallery, and somebody else needs to do that,\u201d he said of his move.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was post-quake, and I thought that Christchurch, with my parents having met here, represented a really interesting place. It was in a place of transition and change. And even though there was a blueprint for that change, it was really unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the art school was vulnerable at the time. Student numbers had dropped as people moved away and there were questions about how the university would survive.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I think that what was really great was that the university and other parts of Christchurch and the world beyond recognised the benefits of what the arts provide.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think in Christchurch, art has been a really important part of the rebuild and the reforming of identity across the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kreisler moved into a new role as head of creative and digital arts in 2024, and then took up his job with SCAPE in May this year, where he says he can \u201cget back into that headspace of curating\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aaron Kreisler wants to interrupt your daily routine. As the newest managing curator at SCAPE Public Art in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":619877,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-619876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/619877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}