"The South Seas Exhibition fostered an emergent nationalism and utilised landscape art ‘for promotional purposes.’ With the passage of time however, the trees have shifted in meaning – from encapsulating the budding desires of a nation-building state, to representing notions of ecological or social shelter within a public, urban space. Within Civic Pride, Wilde Projects encourages arboreal intimacies– providing a set of alternative ways of engaging with these temporal travellers. This conversation is aided by the addition of turned wooden bowls, created by local craftspeople using the wood of most recently felled Octagon Plane trees. Set alongside artworks and imagery from both the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena, Civic Pride sets out to broker a new conversation about the changing nature and function of a site that sits in the civic heart of Ōtepoti".
www.dunedin.art.museum/exhibitions/present/civic-pride//