Harry Culy and Tyne Gordon, Wishbone

Jhana Millers presents Wishbone, an exhibition of new work by Harry Culy and Tyne Gordon.

This series of photographic and painted works draws on the quiet mysteries of the everyday, offering a dreamlike meditation on place, ritual, and transformation. The exhibition takes its name from the delicate wishbone—part anatomical artefact, part object of superstition—inviting us to consider what lingers just beneath the surface of the familiar.

Culy’s silver gelatin photographs render traces of human life within liminal domestic and suburban landscapes across Aotearoa. Working intuitively, he makes pictures that feel both recognizable and eerie—a street sign reading Gothic Street, a plucked chicken about to be roasted, a filigree wrought-iron graveside fence— the mundane made strange. 

Gordon’s new works on plaster and aluminium feel urgent and gestural—full of scratchy, layered mark-making that evokes the atmospheres of lived spaces and emotional terrain. Sharper and more exposed, they embrace a kind of romantic murk, where the surface becomes a site of friction and movement. They speak to urban environments, psychological states, and the raw immediacy of these materials.

Together, Culy and Gordon conjure a world suspended between the real and the uncanny—fragile and potent. Their practices, while distinct, share an intuitive, atmospheric sensibility that places their works in dialogue. This is the first time the artists have worked on an exhibition together, though the pairing has long felt inevitable—like two strands of a wishbone, revealing unexpected connections and shared tensions.