In the final exhibition at Auckland’s city gallery, prior to its closing for major redevelopment, a detached wall is converted into a provocation about conditions – both for and about art, and worlds within and beyond the gallery walls. Staged in the context of fundraising for the gallery's expansion, the 12 square metre disposable nappy weave titled Canvas engages notions of “support”. Fixed vertically on a scale suitable for grand gestures and monumental painting, the weft and warp of white diapers is literally a support. Stretching over and around the planar surface, it proposes an empty stage – primed for action, simultaneously soft and taut. Inside the quasi-museum with its deep collections filled with colonial and contemporary artworks made predominantly by white men, Canvas posits an opening-up. The field of untouched newborn units presents the inside-out, a mass loaded with promise yet of diminished value through close gendered connections to care-giving and “women’s work”. The artwork title, also a verb: to canvas, amplifies its intention to survey, sample, enquire and explore. Taking half a century to breakdown in landfill, the disposable work will likely outlast the heritage architecture to which it is hinged, and much of its archival contents. Canvas resists statis, holding space for the unseen as it questions institutional systems of display, collection and conservation which shape the cultural capital of a city.