Terrain presents works that examine the world around us, the land and its flora and fauna. Real, imagined, and constructed, these spaces are navigated by perspectives that offer manifestly different ways of looking.

Yuki Kihara’s elegant constructions document overlooked or erased histories. An exacting and exquisitely detailed sense of place is central. Saleapaga Primary School After Tsunami Galu Afi, (2013) records the aftermath of a momentous natural event and its impact on the land. Here the tangibility of a liminal space between built architecture and engulfing nature is palpable. Her Aotea’ula series acknowledges the indentured workers brought from Vanautu to New Zealand in the 1870s who were forcibly transported to work in the flax mills of Auckland.

Examining the impacts of colonization on the land, Jenna Packer collapses time while building parabolic dreamscapes of real and imagined human impact. Parked up utes, plastic chairs and the constructions of the petrochemical industry are connected by vein-like systems, unveiling the connections which bind the industrial and natural worlds and the past and present together.

Karl Maughan explores the architecture of the garden through luscious brushwork and saturated colour. Banks of cultivated foliage and flowers border winding paths that entice yet hint at enigmatic conclusions. By contrast, Michael McHugh casts a magnifying lens on the details of his botanical subjects, offering vibrant meditations on abstracted pattern, form, and line.

Using light, harnessing refraction and an abstracted language, Russell Moses hones landscapes into essences and moments where surface, light and mutating colour are the subject.

Clear eyed and uncannily calm presentations of iconic New Zealand are contrasted with micro industries of apian activity in the deceptive landscapes of Michael Hight. Conversely his night paintings, surreal in nature, explore the interior connections and relationships objects, memory, place and space occupy in the human psyche.

Back country roads, dusty signs, blue summer skies, half ploughed paddocks and intriguing visual rhythms are key components of Dick Frizzell’s unmistakable visual language. These images are the achingly familiar landscapes omitted from polished, idealized views of our country.

Terrain reaffirms and powerfully reminds us that the variable and particular issues of identity, location, the past and the present remain amongst – if not the – central narrative of contemporary art practice here.