Name: Grace Terry, To Look Twice, exhibition & opening event
Start: 2026-02-11T07:30:00+13:00
End: 2026-02-11T09:30:00+13:00
Location: 444 Karangahape Rd, Auckland, New Zealand 1010

Grace Terry, To Look Twice, exhibition & opening event

EXHIBITION: 11 February - 7 March 2026
OPENING EVENT: Wednesday, 11 February, 5.30-7.30pm
These paintings begin with an inherited, pre-digital archive, images taken long before they belonged to me and before their logic of looking could be questioned. Drawn from photographs taken by my father during his early adulthood, living and working as a sign writer at a holiday park in Le Midi, France, these images belong to a visual world shaped by his framing, a male-authored image of leisure and youth. Blurring and cropping dislodge the camera's original intentions; the certainty of its framing slips, and the assumptions embedded in it become faintly, and deliberately, unstable.
Throughout the series, a wry sense of masculinity threads the work together. Cars stand in for bodies; bodies sidestep the roles the lens once rehearsed for them. The source imagery’s confident posture is turned back on itself. Still visible, but softened, misaligned, and occasionally undone by humour. These small acts of redirection let the image’s inherited authority lose its footing without ever needing to be loudly refused.
Placed amidst this reconsidered gaze is one final painting that turns the archive inside-out: the photographer, my father, now becomes the subject, no longer behind the lens but held within it. Instead of offering resolution, this image simply acknowledges the structure that shaped the others. It closes the loop with a quiet skew in position.
Text enters the series with similar slyness, lifted from the archive’s documentation of signwriting, a practice grounded in technical skill and masculine labour. Inherited signwriting brushes once used to produce clean, authoritative letters, now work alongside makeup brushes to generate a deliberately unstable surface, blurred not like a camera, but like skin breathed into paint, a kind of contemporary sfumato that loosens the original image’s grip.
Together, these tools mark the shift from the archive’s masculine mode of looking to the perspective of the female painter who inherits it. Through this body of work, the archive shifts from object to subject, revealing the structures it once imposed. In doing so, the series affirms that looking is never neutral, and neither is the hand that re-sees.
Grace Terry completed postgraduate studies at Whitecliffe School of Art in 2025 and prior did her undergruaduate studies at Massey University in Wellington. This is her first time exhibiting with Melanie Roger Gallery.
All artworks will be added to our website the week before the opening event - www.melanierogergallery.com
To register interest or enquire, pease email us at [email protected]