Eaton x Scott Cai
Each month, Boutique Connection supports Sanderson Contemporary Art’s exhibition openings.
This is a collaboration of wine and art pairing where we pair a handcrafted New Zealand wine with the artist’s hero piece. The project explores how taste and texture can echo a visual experience and perhaps even enhance it.
I’m exploring the non-verbal dialogue between art and wine and pairing each artist’s hero piece with a wine that echoes its mood, energy, and emotion.
The aim is to translate visual expression into taste, inviting viewers to experience the artwork through another sensory lens. Each match is intuitive and collaborative, celebrating both the artist’s vision and the craft of our boutique producers.
Scott Cai - Soft Barriers
In Soft Barriers, Scott Cai invites us to look a little closer at the everyday world around us. Through photography, he finds beauty and intrigue in ordinary places and overlooked details, encouraging us to question what we think we're seeing.
There's something I really enjoy about this idea. How often do we walk past something without giving it a second thought? Scott's work asks us to slow down, pay attention and perhaps discover something unexpected in the familiar.
Skywalk
For our wine pairing, Scott chose Skywalk, a photograph of a metallic wall panel on a shopping mall walkway connecting two parts of a complex.
At first glance, the image feels calm and almost dreamlike. Pale, cloud-like blues give it a sense of lightness, while deeper, warmer tones bring it back to earth. But look a little longer and something begins to feel slightly off.
A small dent in the metallic surface distorts the reflection, interrupting what should otherwise be a seamless image. As Scott explained, a skywalk is designed to carry us safely between two places, yet here the reflected space feels strangely uncertain.
I love that something so small can completely change how we experience an image. What might ordinarily be considered an imperfection becomes the very thing that makes us stop and look again.
To accompany Skywalk, I've chosen Eaton's Thistle Hill Sauvignon Blanc, an organically grown, wild-fermented, hazy and unfiltered expression of a variety we all think we know.
Sauvignon Blanc is often associated with freshness, brightness and clarity. But this one takes a slightly different path. Rather than polishing away every irregularity, the winemaking allows the wine to retain some of its wild character, texture and natural haze.
And that's where I see the connection with Scott's work.
Both begin with something familiar. A shopping mall walkway. A glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Things we might think we understand without needing to give them much attention.
But in Skywalk, a small distortion changes our perception of the image. In Thistle Hill, the haze and wild fermentation challenge our expectations of what Sauvignon Blanc should look and taste like.
Neither needs to be perfectly clear or polished to be beautiful. In fact, it's those little irregularities that make them interesting.
Enjoy!
- Renée Dale
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Scott Cai
Soft Barriers
16 September - 11 October 2026Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Soft Barriers by Scott Cai
Scott Cai’s latest exhibition Soft Barriers extends his practice in both material and context, exploring and representing North America in photographs, alongside a new foray into ceramics, object design and sculpture.
Soft Barriers is primarily driven by Cai’s images captured during an extended period of travel through the United States. Most were shot in Los Angeles and some from the East Coast. The artist spent a lot of time on the road, and while clearly reflected in the images, this also subtly guides how we navigate the conceptual terrain. Known for his ritual wanderings on foot, here Cai takes to the automobile, a technology inextricably linked to histories of American photography, and to the wider transformation and proliferation of the medium.
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Read more from Emil McAvoy here.
