Once Upon A Time is an art exhibition by local artist, Peter Dornauf.

Once upon a time is an exhibition that celebrates a bucolic rural world, a time and place in the Waikato that for the artist came to represent his Garden of Eden experience.

He translates that vision via the use of numbers: 1 – 6 (an allusion to the Genesis narrative) alongside images that include New Zealand toys – tractors and trucks, figures from childhood storybooks, macrocarpa trees, and the ubiquitous implement shed.

In the same way the artist Matisse drew on classical mythology to eulogize an age and locale, Dornauf draws on Hebrew myth to convey the same idea as applied to his own world, and by extension, the world of us all.