About Canary Gallery

Canary Gallery was inaugurated on Auckland’s K Road in March 2004 by founding directors Paula Booker and J A Wallace and closed permanently in August 2006*. Dedicated to exhibiting, publishing and promoting experimental contemporary art, Canary provided a venue for developing critical conversation around artwork. In 2003, practicing sculptors Wallace, Geraets and Booker responded to the perceptible lack of exhibition venues in Auckland and worked on their model for a gallery. The trio then renovated a former K Road barbershop into their distinctive and ungainly approximation of a white cube. That was it.

The artist-run space took its name from the sensitive birds that were used in coalmines to test the atmosphere’s toxicity. The gallery itself can be rationalised as an indicator of the combined ability of the Auckland art community, Canary’s directors, and its contributors to sustain independent and unfunded artist-run space. They understood that when the space was not needed this would be apparent: from inception, the directors admitted that changing conditions like participation levels, motivation and prerogatives could cause the ‘death’ of Canary Gallery. They also acknowledged that this would be a positive outcome, as any new project space to fill the gap has the potential to be as pertinent to its era as Canary was to its time.

The gallery closed for a variety of reasons, the least of which was the lack of financial support as the planned life span was cut by only six months because of failure to secure funding. As an artist’s project the gallery always had sustainability issues. The co-directors were not motivated to create a gallery in the prevalent model of democratically run, publicly funded mini-institution. Instead choosing a short life of vitality for the Canary, leaving a space for new initiates to fill and allowing the co-directors to move on to other projects and focus on their own practices.

Canary was well supported by a community of artists, curators, contributors, and volunteers, in addition the project space also attracted a surprisingly broad audience – including those who made their gallery visits online. A strong community and audience is the heart of such volunteer-dependent initiatives.