B.

This week we've been installing a new collection exhibition, Your Hotel Brain. It replaces curator Ken Hall's elegant meditation on architecture and memory, Above Ground, in the contemporary collection galleries.

This year’s weekly ArtBite programme is about to start! From Friday 10 February, we will again offer a weekly presentation of a work on display here at Te Puna o Waiwhetū. The aim of these 30-minute talks is to give you an art break in the middle of your day. We know you’re busy, so this isn’t a long lecture meant to take up too much of your time. And they’re free. With a new work presented each Friday at 12.30pm, the information will be fresh so you can impress your friends during your weekend socialising.

Commentaries on Doris Lusk’s work often talk about her ‘eye’; for telling details, for spatial complexities, for colour, for line. Many of those who met the painter personally remember her eyes too, but for a different reason, recalling how she would peer out inscrutably from behind thickly rimmed spectacles, with a gaze that was simultaneously intimidating and engaging. It seems appropriate then, that when Kevin Capon photographed Lusk in 1985 the result was this extreme close-up. After setting up his camera and lighting, Capon invited his subjects to approach the camera however they preferred, catching them in the act of looking back. Lusk’s face fills the frame, the black lens of her glasses creating a portal-like opening, connecting us with her in that moment and suggesting both her curiosity and her reticence.

A few weeks ago my family and I visited Cass but something didn't look quite right.