While Christina Pataialii has always used house paint as a medium alongside acrylic, she has never applied it quite so literally as in “Proximity and Distance”: She painted directly onto the two largest walls of Tauranga Art Gallery’s cavernous atrium, as well as on sections of painters’ drop cloth that had been stapled to the wall. While many painters would be put off by the sheer size of the space, Pataialii seemed comfortable with the scale. Compositionally, the two main walls functioned as smaller works that had been scaled up, with none of the artist’s usual level of detail lost but with