Chartwell Collection - News RSS

Australia Council Creative Australia Fellowship - Lauren Brincat

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Congratulations to Lauren Brincat, who has been awarded one of the Australia Council’s inaugural Creative Australia Fellowships. The Fellowships are a new initiative to support the professional development of established and early career artists. Lauren’s Creative Fellowship will allow her to undertake an artist residency at IASPIS in Stockholm, Sweden.

Australia Council press release >

Image: Lauren Brincat, Hear This, 2011.

Melbourne Art Foundation 2012 Artist Commission - Ian Burns

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Melbourne Art Foundation has announced that New York-based Australian artist Ian Burns will be the Commission Artist for the upcoming Melbourne Art Fair, which takes place 1-5 August. Burns’ work will be a large-scale sculptural work titled Clouds:

"Against the cultural backdrop of the increasingly virtual nature of the screen-based image, Ian Burns presents a sculptural work that links the technological screen with embodied experience. An imposing sculptural form, Clouds presents the viewer with a pseudo-cinematic series of scenes that suggest a narrative but without end. Generated within the sculpture itself, the scenes are based on images of motion, specifically flight: ladders, toys, tables, lights, salad bowls and other everyday items are repurposed towards the live re-creation of imagery of the clichéd cinematic sublimity of air travel.”

Melbourne Art Foundation press release >

Burns is the fifth Melbourne Art Foundation Commission Artist; previous artists include Michael Parekowhai in 2006. The commissioned works are later gifted to an Australian public gallery or museum.

Image: Ian Burns, Makin' Tracks, 2010. Currently on exhibition in Made Active: The Chartwell Show at Auckland Art Gallery.

NOTES 03: Made Active: The Chartwell Show

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

If I could be forgiven for crashing my way through art history, I did think it was a useful idea to pair ideas together from both the Auckland Art Gallery's Degas to Dali exhibition (D to D) and Made Active: The Chartwell Show. It would be a fairly random and, yes, lightweight, pairing/match up really - designed to show viewers that there are more shared ideas/concerns/investigations/obsessions/motifs across the eras than they might initially think. My aim to bridge the gap between a little bit.

Impact of closer contact with Asia.

For many of the artists in D to D, the big thing was Japonism - the frantic obsessional collecting of all things Japanese which occurred in Paris in particular in the 1870s after foreign ships were allowed to trade with Japan after years of exclusion. It was a frenzy of ceramics, kimonos, lacquerwork, objects and prints and deeply influenced French artists from the pre to post Impressionist eras.In Daniel Malone's work, Black Market...the influx of Asian immigration in the 1990s is reflected in the huge amount of material he gathered at the time - objects that reflected New Zealand's new engagement with Asia from cigarette packages, toys, masks, maps, books, and magasines among other things. Malone's own lengthy study of Mandarin is also represented in the exhibition from his language flash cards to study books.

The love between a mother and a son.

Campbell Patterson's multiple part video Lifting My Mother For As Long As I Can shows the son holding his mother in his arms, done with care, sometimes embarrassment, often with giggles and always with love. The mother's body position is reminiscent of many mother/son depictions throughout art history- but in reverse. Usually it is the mother cradling the son- like in Pieta- a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture by Michelangelo Buonarroti, housed in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. Michelangelo is said to have been 24 when he carved this incredible sculpture. When the video series started in 2006, Campbell Patterson was 23. In the D to D show, we can see the theme again represented- with Rodin's The Young Mother, 1885, Renoir's 1894 work A Woman Nursing a Child. Interestingly, the other link between Patterson's work and those of an earlier era, is the use of a curtain as a backdrop- there are millions of examples but in the D to D show, there is the work by Vuillard in which he sets his mother and sister into a close and flattened domestic space defined by a flat screen in the background, and also the Degas work, Woman Drying Herself, from 1890-95, with its bright red curtain flowing brilliantly behind.

In the news

Jim Allen's use of the newspaper in his work Hanging by a Thread, incorporates the artist using newspaper in a earlier performance work, as well as cuttings and clippings collaged from newspapers and magazine in the more recent components of the work. The time lapsed between the two phases of work contained in the installation reflects the changing nature of information, news, and the public's reception or even immunity to news of things such as suffering and war today. A close look at the work by Braque in the D to D show, reveals his love of including newspapers in the cubist works he and Picasso were making - the newspaper represented the everyday, found objects of the artist's immediate environments. In the work Le Bougeoir shows the lettering of the French-Catalan newspaper L'Indépendant. It also includes a candle and candlestick- referenced in the title. Jim Allen's use of a candle and candle holder in his collaged work within the larger installation also has a symbolic use.

more to come...feedback welcomed.

Walters Prize 2012 nominees announced

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Chartwell would like to congratulate the recently announced Walters Prize 2012 nominees: Simon Denny, Alicia Frankovich, Kate Newby, and Sriwhana Spong. Their works will be exhibited in the Chartwell Gallery at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki from August to October; particularly exciting this year as the nominated works were all originally shown off-shore. The winner will be announced on 20 October.

Chartwell has supported each of the nominated artists and their recent practices, and all are represented in the collection (view works by Simon Denny, Alicia Frankovich, Kate Newby, and Sriwhana Spong).

New publication - Daniel Malone: Black Market Next To My Name

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

To coincide with the upcoming exhibition of Daniel Malone’s major installation Black Market Next To My Name in Made Active: The Chartwell Show at Auckland Art Gallery, Clouds and Hopkinson Cundy are publishing a new book documenting the work. Titled Black Market Next To My Name, the publication will feature writing by Liv Barrett and Daniel Malone. It will be available from Clouds and Hopkinson Cundy.

Black Market Next To My Name

2012
Text by Liv Barrett and Daniel Malone
Published by Clouds and Hopkinson Cundy
ISBN: 978-0-9876593-3-0

Softcover
16 pages
47 colour images, 6 black/white images
Edition: 1000

NZD$10.00

Made Active: The Chartwell Show

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Made Active: The Chartwell Show

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
14 April - 15 July 2012
www.aucklandartgallery.com

Opening on 14 April, 2012 is Made Active: The Chartwell Show, Level 2, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, New Zealand.

Artists in the show, curated by Natasha Conland, with works drawn from the Chartwell Collection are:

Jim Allen/ Nick Austin/ Stephen Birch/ Ian Burns/ Paul Cullen/ Simon Denny/ Estate of L. Budd (lionel b.)/ Finn Ferrier/ Alicia Frankovich/ Shaun Gladwell/ Amy Howden-Chapman/ Paul Kos/ Laresa Kosloff/ Allen Maddox/ Daniel Malone/ Richard Maloy/ Gabriella and Silvana Mangano/ Louise Menzies and Louise Tu’u/ Tahi Moore/ Campbell Patterson/ Sriwhana Spong/ Tuafale Tanoai (aka Linda T.)/ Hannah Valentine/ Luke Willis Thompson/ Seung Yul Oh.

Of the 25 exhibiting artists, seven will contribute new performance works to the programme. Made Active is the first presentation of a multi-artist performance programme at the Gallery since the 1970s.

The exhibition runs until 15 July 2012.

Image: Alicia Frankovich, Orpheus, in Made Active: The Chartwell Show.

NOTES 01: Made Active:The Chartwell Show

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

A few notes regarding Made Active:The Chartwell Show...

01: Painting as Performance

Fiona Connor said to me recently that she has lately been thinking about painting as a documentation of performance. This is a good way to think about the physical nature of painting a painting. I read recently about the close links between dance and painting in the late 19^th C in Paris, for example, where choreographers were encouraged to study painting to help them plan and compose their stage designs and the movement of their dancers. In the USA, in the 1950s, artists were close advisors to Merce Cunningham and his dance company. On www.merce.org they explain: "Beginning in 1954, Robert Rauschenberg became the first Artistic Advisor to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and served in this capacity until 1964. Jasper Johns followed from 1967 until 1980. Mark Lancaster was Advisor from 1980 through 1984. The last Advisors to be appointed were Dove Bradshaw and William Anastasi in 1984. The final MCDC Artistic Advisory Committee was comprised of Paula Cooper, Gary Garrels, Eileen Rosenau and Trevor Carlson." Much later, Rauschenberg's painting Immerse (1994) was made to be used as a backdrop for Cunningham's work Events.

NOTES 02: Made Active: The Chartwell Show

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

A few notes regarding Made Active: The Chartwell Show...

02: Abstract Expressionism revisited

In the context of this exhibition, where objects such as Paul Kos’ Equilibre 1V, 1992, are installed with expressionist paintings by Allen Maddox within a broader discussion of action and performance, it was fascinating to read in the Paul Kos catalogue I have, about his involvement early in his career in an exhibition in 1969 called The Return of Abstract Expressionism, at the Richmond Art Center, Richmond, California. The curator wrote at the time “When Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis let the paint leave their hands, gravity formed the shape of the stain on the raw canvas. This exhibition of Abstract Expressionism is a direct extension of the painting of the ‘50s; the action is the same only the dimensions are different. The gesture is the same and the procedure similar if more athletic. The artists exhibit the same love of organic and natural forces, they place a familiar emphasis on the role of accident and chance...the artists (in the exhibition) are not interested in producing objects. The majority of the pieces exist only for the duration of the show. ..The artist is involved with the direct manipulation of materials that possess qualities of spontaneity and improvisation, and that normally produces dispensable work. It is the act of creation which is art.”

This seems to have interesting parallels for the Auckland Art Gallery exhibition in 2012 too.

from: Everything Matters, Paul Kos, A Retrospective, Constance M.Lewallen, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2003

Amy's Column 05 - Andrea Zittel at Regen Projects, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 11:00:00 GMT

The promise of land was a crucial part of the American dream. People migrated from the Eastern states in search of wider horizons and, by and large, they found them. The land of the West of the US has long been a site for the reinvention of cultural norms. As Marilynne Robinson, the Western born iconic American writer, has written, “I think it was in fact peculiarly Western to feel no tie of particularity to any single past or history, to experience that much underrated thing called deracination, the meditative, free appreciation of whatever comes under one’s eye”[1].

The Landscape of the West and how it is perceived, and changed, through the eye and by the body, was central to Andrea Zittel’s show at Regen Projects, with land viewed from above, afar and in abstract. Land was modelled, rendered in wood and paint and photographed; aerial views of land which had been captured from above were then transformed into kaleidoscopic wallpaper. Land could also be seen in the flesh, with Zittel inviting the public to visit, congregate on her land, drive over it and perform on it.

Occupying the central space of the show was a large model of the particular piece of land that has become the site and central subject of Zittel’s work. The oscillating topography of ‘A-Z West’, named after the land Zittel owns in Joshua Tree, on the dry and mountainous eastern outskirts of Los Angeles, was constructed from plaster laid over hessian laid over a skeletal metal frame, with architectural models of buildings dotting the scene. The sculpture acted like a ghostly version of a visitors’ centre map with the scale and position of the piece allowing viewers to circumnavigate it and take in the natural complexities of the site – boulders, dipping valleys, hills drifting into planes. In some places a lack of surface revealed the model’s underlying metal structure, with these sections signifying where Zittel’s land ownership ceased.

Zittel has acquired the land over time, gradually buying up small adjacent plots. The plots’ irregular shape were determined by laws such as the Homesteading Act which, from 1862, allowed small parcels of federal land to be claimed simply through 5 years of occupation and making improvements. The Act was part of a policy to entice settlement to the western United States. The model revealed the way in which an ideology of property rights has come to define the manner in which the land in the US is formally conceptualised. With the wild geography of the high desert being carved up in rectangles to be sold, subdivided, and resold, eventually each section of land becomes a component of a grid, and the integrity of the natural landscape is diminished.

Zittell’s is a divine viewpoint, from which we look down at the modelled land and it calls to mind military planning – the plotting of troop movements across foreign territory to advance greater political aims. Although Zitell is no ruler she is certainly a leader. Seeing the model of A-Z West from a bird’s eye point of view allows insight into how Zitell might conceptualise land as a forum in which to play out larger ideas of utopian living. It has been a place where she has experimented with structures for living, caravans and sleeping chambers, but it is also a place to make active through presence and process. During the Regen Projects exhibition, another weekend of ‘High Desert Test Site projects’ was held. A good portion of the Los Angeles arts community seemed to disappear on the pilgrimage out to Joshua Tree, returning with many tales including performers dancing in the dirt until collapsing into a car and driving off into the sunset, leaving the audience in their dust.

In ‘Prototype For Billboard at A-Z West: Big Rock on Hill Behind House 2011,’ a figure appears larger than life in paintings that are themselves oversized, each having been painted on a standard piece of plywood. Where blankness or whiteness of canvas might appear in other images, here the wood grain shows through, revealing the materiality of the painting’s structure, knots and grain becoming the figure’s skin or the contours of a rock.

Although we see a body moving through the billboards, we see no face, yet it seems to be Zitell herself as suggested by the figure’s actions which place and hold abstract shapes into and against a desert landscape. A further sign that it is the artist’s image we are witnessing is the presence of one of Zitell’s artist uniforms, a simply stitched smock and top.

A panoply of these uniforms dominates Regen Project’s second gallery space, the outfits appearing like a textile army displayed on a grid of 42 mannequins. For years Zitell has produced a uniform for each season. The outfits seen catalogued together show the passing of time, as felted woollen dresses give way to lighter spring tunics and as a baby bump suddenly has to be accommodated in a uniform of web-like white felt; uniforms for artists are declared to be uniforms also for the work of love and life, including the body’s requirements in the last trimester of pregnancy. While celebrating craft, the uniforms also point to a political dimension behind creating art that is utilitarian. Zitell’s work investigates every layer of living, not least the materials used to insulate and interact with the body. Each material she uses is selected as the best interface between body and land.

Through detailed consideration of the shape and fabric of domestic structures, Zitell’s work highlights the superficiality with which much of suburbia is planned and constructed. As the kaleidoscopic wallpaper declares, much new desert development is repeating patterns, cookie-cutter houses on sprawling streets, all of dubious sustainability. Zitell critiques such modes of development through a resourceful use of materials and an awareness of the local character and unique environmental setting of her own plot of land. In opposition to existing norms, her art exemplifies how life can be organised in sympathy with the land.

[1] Marilynne Robinson' quoted in “West Toward Home:Tracking Marilynne Robinson's intellectual pilgrimage,” by Charles Petersen. Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2012.

Amy Howden-Chapman is an artist and writer born in 1984 in Wellington, New Zealand. She has exhibited widely in Australasia, Europe and the United Stated, and her writing has appeared in publications including, Landfall, Sport, and Natural Selection. In 2011 she graduated from California Institute of the Arts with a Master in Fine Arts. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

All images: Andrea Zittel, installation view, Regen Projects II, Los Angeles, September 16 – October 29, 2011. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photography by Brian Forrest.

Starkwhite at The Armory Show 2012

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 11:00:00 GMT

The Armory Show 2012

New York City
8 − 11 March 2012
www.thearmoryshow.com

Starkwhite presented two NZ artists at The Armory Show 2012 in New York City. New York-based Martin Basher exhibited new paintings and sculptures, pictured above.

"The booth will feature panels of two-way mirror, stands, and arrangements of grid wall alongside a series of optically complex abstract paintings. Viewers will be able to see through some work and be reflected in others - almost as if they have stepped inside one of his mirrored display vitrines. Rather than merely passively looking in, the viewer will become an integral part of the piece, moving amongst grid and reflection. The work will allow viewers to look, and perhaps to also reflect, literally, and metaphorically, on the conditions of art, commerce, and desire."
Starkwhite, The Armory Show and Armory Film 2012

Auckland-based photographer Gavin Hipkins presented an experimental screen narrative, titled This Fine Island, in the inaugural edition of Armory Film. Shot in 16mm colour negative film, the narrative revists Charles Darwin's journey to New Zealand in 1835, his writing on the journey becoming "a vehicle for present day tourisms, travel romance, and racial othering, against the backdrop of New Zealand's lush landscape" (Starkwhite, Gavin Hipkins: This Fine Island, Armory Film, New York).

Kermadec at Voyager New Zealand Maritime Museum

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:00:00 GMT

Image: John Reynolds on Helipad, photo by Jason O'Hara.

Kermadec

Edmiston Gallery of Maritime Art

Voyager New Zealand Maritime Museum, Auckland 
15 February - 1 July 2012
www.maritimemuseum.co.nz

Kermadec presents a collection of artworks from South Pacific artists inspired by their voyage to the Kermadec region of New Zealand early last year.

Four artists represented in the Chartwell Collection - Phil Dadson, Gregory O’Brien, John Pule and John Reynolds - were invited to take part in Pew Environment Group’s Ocean Legacy Programme, which saw them travel to the Kermadecs, 1,000km north of Auckland, on board the HMNZS Otago in May 2011.

In the videos below Phil Dadson and John Reynolds reflect on their experience. You can visit the Kermadec Vimeo page for further Kermadec videos, including videos of all of the artists involved.

Kermadec: Reflections on a Voyage – Philip Dadson from Bruce Foster on Vimeo.

Kermadec: Reflections on a Voyage – John Reynolds from Bruce Foster on Vimeo.

Kermadec at Edmiston Gallery of Maritime Art >
More about the Kermadecs >

Contemporary Australia: Women at GOMA

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:00:00 GMT

Contemporary Australia: Women

Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland
21 April - 22 July 2012
www.qag.qld.gov.au

Queensland Government Arts Minister Rachel Nolan has announced the 33 artists and collectives to be featured in Contemporary Australia: Women, an exhibition opening at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) on April 21. The exhibition will present new and recent work by emerging, established and senior Indigenous and non-Indigenous female artists from across Australia, including several major new commissions and a series of performative works by groups of younger generation artists.

The line up includes a number of artists represented in the Chartwell Collection - Gabriella and Silvana Mangano, Rose Nolan, Sally Smart, and Louise Weaver. For more details and a full list of artists, visit the GOMA website.

Image: Rose Nolan | Tunnel/Tent Work - HARD BUT FAIR/POINT LESS, 2009 | Acrylic paint, hessian and cotton thread 2484 x 270 x 100cm Image courtesy: The artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

2011 Jane Scally Artist Award

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:00:00 GMT

Congratulations to Laresa Kosloff who has been announced the 2011 recipient of the Jane Scally Art Award.

"The Jane Scally Award will enable me to realise a project in Russia and Scotland that directly engages with the contexts and ideas that have shaped my practice over the years. This is a terrific opportunity and I look forward to the anticipated and unknown outcomes that it will bring."
Laresa Kosloff

Visit the ACCA website for further details on the award, including past recipients.

Image: Laresa Kosloff, Agility Drill, 2011, single channel high definition video on disc

2011 Chartwell Trust Student Art Writing Prize

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:00:00 GMT

The Chartwell Trust Student Art Writing Prize of $500 is awarded annually for a review or essay addressing an exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery or a work from the Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection. The prize is open to all Victoria University students studying Art History, Classics, Religious Studies, Museum and Heritage Studies, English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies. It is administered by the Adam Art Gallery, VUW, Wellington, New Zealand.

This year's prize was awarded to Sharon Taylor-Offord - below is her winning entry.

High on a green grassy knoll overlooking the city of Wellington stands a close grouping of three interconnected ceramic pillars. From whose hand did these come? What do they represent? People sit beside them. Some may even use them as a back-rest whilst soaking up the suns rays and daydreaming between classes at the university which houses them. Perhaps they were commissioned to illustrate the buildings which surrounded them in their previous position in the quad. Their appearance is reminiscent of the work of the pioneering studio potters working in this country in the mid twentieth century; Mirek Smisek, Roy Cowan, Barry Brickell, Len Castle, Doreen Blumhardt. Their glazes reflect the sky and the earth, and their smooth surfaces ask to be touched. These glazed ceramic forms hold close together for support and comfort, a small family of three.

The work was indeed commissioned, to mark the opening of four new university buildings, and was unveiled in 1979 in the Rankine Brown courtyard. The maker was George Kojis. Not a native New Zealander but an American, who studied ceramics at Temple University in Phoenix, Arizona. In 1976 he became a lecturer in art at Wellington Teacher’s College, and also taught pottery, design and ceramics at Wellington Polytechnic School of Design, and at Victoria University. He later relocated to Whanganui where he taught ceramics at Wanganui Polytech for 25 years before retiring to Turangi to indulge his love of fishing.

So, not a mid-century local potter, but a later import. Why, then, does this sculpture speak to me of Roy Cowan and his New Zealand contemporaries? Are there only a finite number of ways to create a ceramic sculptural form? Is there to be a universality to the work because of the constraints of method of creation, of what can be done with a potters wheel and some clay, a hot fire and slip? We need to dig deeper.

In 1970s New Zealand concerns included falling trade with our major traditional market of Britain due to its inclusion in the EEC, the ongoing energy and oil supply crisis, the Vietnam War, and the stirrings of the Think Big policy. Reassurance could be found via a return to the slow paced craft traditions, in much the same way that the followers of the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris had found reassurance in the handmade in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. Artists have an inclination to return to the primitive forms of art-making in times of social and emotional stress. Comfort was to be found in the intimate contact with clay and water. The trend toward studio pottery and ceramics was widespread during the 1970s and developed from domesticware to encompass the sculptural as the decade progressed.

In 1978 an estimated 2000 potters were working full-time at their craft in Zealand with another 3000 earning at least a part of their income from potting. Douglas Lloyd Jenkins puts it that studio pottery in New Zealand was reaching a frenzied peak of popularity.¹ The sculptural possibilities of clay in large format was being explored by local potter Barry Brickell who was basing works on trains and the female form. This heralded an opening up of the manner in which fired clay could be regarded. Developments in the American Abstract Expressionist ceramic movement were disseminated here amongst the pottery community and collectors. Peter Voulkos, leader of the Californian Otis Art group in the 1960s, made sculptures famous for their visual weight, their freely-formed construction, and their aggressive and energetic decoration. Works with gouged surfaces, finished with painted brushstrokes.² His work was included in the 1966 exhibition Abstract Expressionist Ceramics. George Kojis’ must have been aware of such freely composed ceramic pieces and his arrival here in the mid 1970s would have assisted in the sharing of information and techniques. Certainly his work contains elements commensurate with the ceramics of his homeland at this time.

If we look at this un-named work from the university collection we can see differences from his New Zealand counterparts. His glazes are more colourful. Gone is the reliance upon muted earth-tones. We have the blue of the sky, the green of the hills surrounding Wellington, and the ochrey yellows and browns which underlie them. The painterly strokes of deep carmine red further enliven the colour palette. The surfaces are not all smooth. They are lively with incisions, grooves, grids. Circular patterns emerge, and vaguely floral forms. There is a feeling of movement as lines curve about the pieces and intersect. Their image alters with the play of light during daylight hours, and their shadows fall to spread out along the base which echoes their forms.

In the best tradition of abstract art we are free to make our own personal associations. The viewer may look to the ancient headstones below and imagine a correlation, or to the movement of our notorious wind in the flaxes beyond as clouds scud across the sky above creating shadow play. In their original site they were within sight of Fred Grahams commissioned kauri and totara carving Tane and Tupai, 1975 (Wellington, Victoria University of Wellington Collection) sited in the library foyer. Tane is holding up the sky to let the light in while holding the three baskets of knowledge in the form of a diploma-like scroll.³ Considered together these works give us both the buildings which house the learning process and the end result.

Prior to the arrival of the European in New Zealand there had been no Maori work in clay. The new settlers quickly discovered the abundance of clay deposits which they utilised initially to make bricks and drainpipes, later expanding to an abundance of domestic ware. Export tariffs in later years encouraged continuation of this industry. By 1978 some New Zealand potters had been working to break free of the constraints of their Anglo-Oriental influences to make work with a local flavour and identity personified within it. Barry Brickells Untitled, n.d. (Manchester Collection) is very similar in construction to piece just inside the doors to the William J. Scott Education library at the Teachers’ College where Kojis worked.⁴ Roy Cowan and Juliet Peter are photographed by Marti Freidlander for the New Vision potters calendar of 1967 with one of Roy’s large lantern pots (Wellington, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa). Whilst these works are in pot format still they are not on a domestic scale, or able to be used in any manner apart from the decorative.

George Kojis has described his work as a search for the indigenous vessel-one that incorporates both cultural and traditional influences.⁵ He has created forms particular to the place of their making. The substance of their being is the soil upon which they stand. Kojis’ three 1.5 metre tall forms are purely sculptural, exemplifying the progression of this genre. The use of more organic forms, and of local minerals to glaze allowed a ‘signature of place’ to be translated into strongly textured stoneware with muted tones, with renderings of landscape as form or surface.⁶ The wandering lines of Kojis’ obelisks may evoke the fault lines beneath. Kojis blends his American influences with those of his new home, and the potters with whom he would have been in proximity via his teaching roles.

These roles must have led to his choice as commissioned artist. The university now wished to add elements other than the painted canvas to its collection. The purchase committee decreed that funds be set aside from the building budget to commission substantial works of art. This was the only work resulting from that policy.⁷ Christina Barton writes that Victoria’s art collection fulfills the ambitions of the university to add a visual dimension to the cultural life of the campus, and that works such as these were chosen not only in terms of their artistic merit, but also with an eye to withstanding the testing conditions of a student environment.⁸ The chip on one corner and the residue of a sticker on this ceramic suggest close encounters with the student body. Although it has not proven to be from the hand of one of our well known studio potters it is a valued collection item, familiar to many because of its outdoor locales. Originally it stood quietly in a corner of the quad by a stair, and blended into its surroundings. It now stands as sentinel, providing a visual link between the towers of learning beyond and those of commerce below.

References
1. Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, At Home: A Century of New Zealand Design, Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2004, p.243-244.
2. ‘Otis and its influences' by Garth Clark, www.karaartservers.ch/collections/fred.marer/clark-gb.html; and http:/Wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Voulkos, accessed 4 November 2011.
3. William McAloon (ed), Victoria’s Art: A University Collection, Wellington: Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University, 2005, p58.
4. This piece is not referenced in the Collection PDF.
5. http://www.digitalnzgeoparse.tripodtravel.co.nz. OpenCalais-person-George Kojis, accessed 21 October 2011.
6. Moyra Elliott and Damien Skinner (eds), Cone Ten Down: Studio pottery in New Zealand, 1945-1980, Auckland: David Bateman, 2009, p.133.
7. McAloon, 2005, p.21.
8. Mcaloon, 2005, p.93.

Bibliography
Barrowman, Rachel, ‘The Creative Edge, 1999, http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly, accessed 21 October 2011.
Christchurch Art Gallery Collection, ‘Otamatea Platform Series’, http://www.digitalnzgeoparser.tripodtravel.co.nz/pencalais/person/george-kojis, accessed 21 October 2011.
Clark, Garth, 'Otis and its influences’, http://www.karaartservers.ch/collections/fred.marer/clark-gb.html, accessed 6 November 2011.
Elliott, Moyra and Damien Skinner (eds),Cone Ten Down: Studio pottery in New Zealand, 1945-1980, Auckland: David Bateman, 2009.
Henry, Gail, New Zealand Pottery Commercial and Collectable, Auckland: Reed Books, 1985, 1999 edition.
http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/collection/inventory, accessed 21 October 2011, 6 November 2011.
Lloyd Jenkins, Douglas, At Home A century of New Zealand Design, Auckland: Random House, 2004.
McAloon, William (ed), Victoria’s Art: A University Collection, Wellington: Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University, 2005.
'Peter Voulkos', http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Voulkos, accessed 6 November 2011.
Smith, Judy, ‘Creative Clay Group, Taupo’, http://www.nzpotters.com, accessed 21 October 2011.

Sharon Taylor-Offord returned to study in 2009 and has just completed her third year studying art history at Victoria University. She chose to write about the George Kojis ceramic work for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s new and more prominent position out in the open above the city seemed noteworthy. Large scale ceramics interest Sharon because of the collaboration that is involved in their making. Kiln firings of such works as the Kojis became events, often attended by noted potters such as Barry Brickell, Roy Cowan and Juliet Peter. She felt that the parameters of the writing brief offered a chance to explore this artwork in depth. As she says: “The opportunity to structure research of a more personal nature appealed to me, as did the chance to write an essay in which I could set my own questions to answer. That little resource material was available added to the fun. That the essay was successful in winning the prize was completely beyond my expectations. I am very grateful to the judges for their kind words, and for the prize, and I am very pleased that this lovely triptych of clay forms may now merit more than a perfunctory glance from passersby”.

Paul Cullen publication r/p/m + Senior Fullbright Award

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:00:00 GMT

Congratulations to Paul Cullen who has been selected for one of the 2012 Senior Fullbright Awards.

Paul will be based in the Architecture Department at Auburn University in Alabama where he will work with landscape architects to develop a site-based outdoor sculpture project. In parallel with this he will be researching experimental site-based art projects in various locations around the US including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Marfa. He will return to NZ via Germany for Documenta 13 and to carry out further research in Munich and Berlin.

Jane Sander Art Agent Newsletter >

Photos: Asumi Mizuo. Courtesy of S/F.

Auckland project space and bookshop split/fountain also launched his new book, r/p/m, last night. r/p/m includes essays from Richard Dale, Melissa Laing, Tessa Laird, and Ruth Watson.

"In a time when there are plenty of attempts to highlight the ‘uniqueness’ of the book as an endangered object – to play-up its arty capabilities – to foster home-groups for the crafty book arts (which are not without their charms for anthropologists of the present) – here is a publication project which knows how to place the idea of the book-object precisely within the materialities of print history, while also letting it float on the currents and eddies of digital waterways. Shadowed by the virtual, and flecked by drifting data, r/p/m Paul Cullen enacts the knowledge that printed matter is all about organizational specifics, and particularities of effect. It relativizes the shuffle of text and image between the formats of magazine, catalogue, book, inventory, dossier. Propelled as it is by hypotheses, models, tests, charts, cross-sections, circulation systems, and theatres of scientific research, Paul Cullen’s art is well served by this publication, which dissects the book as object and distributional event through its adoption of the exposed spine and interchangeable, differently coloured, gatefold covers." (Allan Smith)

See the split/fountain website for further details.

View Paul Cullen's works in the Chartwell Collection >

Thumbnail image: Paul Cullen, r/p/m, published by split/fountain, photographed by Asumi Mizuo. Courtesy of S/F.

Michael Parekowhai shortlisted for Asia Pacific Triennial 7 public sculpture

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 11:00:00 GMT

Update: We're happy to report that Michael Parekowhai's proposed sculpture, The World Turns, was awarded Premier of Queensland's Sculpture Commission. You can read more details about the work and the commission on Creative New Zealand's NZ At Venice blog.

Following his success in Venice, Michael Parekowhai has been selected as one of three artists shortlisted to create a $1 million public sculpture in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT7). Parekowhai was nominated alongside Huang Yong Ping and Rirkrit Tirevanija, with the winner to be announced in November. The winning sculpture will be unveiled on the banks of the Brisbane River at GoMa's eastern corner in December 2012.

Visit the Queensland Art Gallery's APT webpage to read more about Triennial, and the news story here for more information about the public sculpture project. You can also view Michael Parekowhai's works in the Chartwell Collection.

Thumbnail image: Michael Parekowhai, They Comfort Me, 1992, enamel paint on wood

2011 Arts Foundation of New Zealand Award for Patronage

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:00:00 GMT

Video: Slide show of works in the Chartwell Collection

Chartwell would like to thank the Arts Foundation for awarding us the 2011 Arts Foundation of New Zealand Award for Patronage.

"Chartwell is delighted to receive an Award for Patronage from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, which is doing so much to raise awareness of the value of private charitable support for the arts in this country. Through such agency new possibilities for the human imagination, grounded in thinking via all the senses becomes possible, along with expectations of expanding support from Central and Local Government. In this way, our New Zealand cultural life will be enriched, resulting in expanded pride and understandings of ourselves and others."
Rob Gardiner

From The Arts Foundation:
The Trust was awarded this honour for its extraordinary commitment to the visual arts. The sixth annual recipient of this prestigious Award, the Chartwell Trust joins previously honoured philanthropists Denis and Verna Adam, Dame Jenny Gibbs, Roderick and Gillian Deane, Adrienne, Lady Stewart and Gus and Irene Fisher.

Robert Gardiner ONZM established the Chartwell Trust in Hamilton in the 1970s to assist the visual arts in New Zealand. Forty years later, the Chartwell Trust has provided substantial funding to galleries, projects and visual artists. Chartwell has also established one of the most important collections of New Zealand and Australian art in New Zealand.

Robert Gardiner said "I believe in the power of the visual arts to deepen our life experiences and to enrich and inspire us. I am pleased to be able to help connect New Zealanders with the benefits the visual arts can bring to our lives".

"The Chartwell Trust's impact on the New Zealand art world is profound" said Arts Foundation Chair, Fran Rickets. "The Trust's philanthropy is strategically implemented so that the arts can flourish under their own momentum with the only 'interference' being 'inspiration'. The Chartwell Trust's philanthropy is world class."

To celebrate the Award, the Arts Foundation gave the Chartwell Trust $20,000 to donate to artists or arts projects of their choosing. As with previous recipients, the Chartwell Trust doubled the amount for distribution with $20,000 of their own and announced that they would make four donations of $10,000 each.

The donation recipients are:

Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki - for the inaugural project commissions on the Edmiston Sculpture Terrace; The University of Auckland - to support a new programme that promotes a deeper understanding of the arts and their role in creative thinking; Christchurch Art Gallery - for outreach activities that take art out into the community in the wake of the 2011 earthquakes; and artist Fiona Connor - towards production costs for New Zealand exhibition projects in 2012, with a particular focus on her Dunedin Public Art Gallery Residency Exhibition.

The Award for Patronage ceremony was held at the recently re-opened Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. The event also celebrated the establishment of the Chartwell Gallery on the fourth floor of the Auckland Art Gallery.

"The Award for Patronage provides an opportunity to highlight the importance of philanthropic support for the arts through the celebration of philanthropists who have made a significant impact on the arts", said Fran Ricketts. "It is also an occasion to acknowledge donors that give at all levels and to further inspire people to give to the arts."

Visit the Arts Foundation's website for further information >

Christchurch Art Gallery blog post >

Otago Daily Times clipping - $10,000 for Dunedin project (PDF) >

Chartwell + Clinton Watkins art download project

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 11:00:00 GMT

The video work by Clinton Watkins presented by Chartwell in conjunction with the artist and Starkwhite for Auckland Art Fair is now available to download free directly from our website. The video is an M4V format and is compressed as a .zip file.

Click here to download video (4MB) >

Since 1994 Clinton Watkins has produced artwork that investigates affects that combinations of sonic and visual information can have on an audience. The key conceptual issues of his work are drawn from an interest in constructing immersive experiences through the use of sound, colour and scale of installation incorporating video projection, television monitors and custom-made audio and video hardware. The visual and sound base of his work focuses on the characteristics, structures, phenomena, and processing of sonic and visual material through the exploration of repetition, distortion, colour, duration and form via a minimalist sensibility.

Reason and Rhyme at ST PAUL St

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 12:00:00 GMT

Reason and Rhyme

ST PAUL St Gallery, Auckland
30 September - 28 October
www.stpaulst.aut.ac.nz

Chartwell are proud to support Reason and Rhyme, a two part collaborative trans-Tasman exchange project between ST PAUL St Gallery and Gertrude Contemporary. New Zealand artists included in the project are Julian Daspher, Richard Frater, Maddie Leach, Simon Morris, Campbell Patterson, with the Australian artists Damiano Bertoli, Starlie Geikie, Hanna Tai, Mimi Tong and Jake Walker.

The exhibition at ST PAUL St Gallery opens on September 29 and runs until October 28. It will be an evolution of the earlier exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary, and will see the launch of a catalogue with documentation of the exhibition, artist pages and other reference material, and commissioned essays.

Images: Reason and Rhyme, 18.03.11 – 16.04.11, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, Australia

"Bringing together ten leading contemporary artists from Australia and New Zealand Reason and Rhyme investigates the urge to structure and channel creative production through systems, grids and frameworks.

The artists in Reason and Rhyme are connected through their use of manifestos, seriality, diagrams and systems, with the exhibition exploring the points where creativity tangles with these parameters, coursing along the edges of grids, and submitting to the regimens of form and the statutes of regulated patterns.

The exhibition will explore the urge to locate oneself within the map or the doctrine, and to impose rules and structures across creative practice. It will investigate how these systematic devices both contain and channel creative enterprise, as well as plotting and contextualising it. Reason and Rhyme investigates how these parameters offer something from which to push up against - a structure to rebel from – when there is nothing left to rebel against.

Through applying ‘objective’ systems over creative processes each of the artists in Reason and Rhyme distinguishes, articulates or uncovers their content. Whether this pull towards systems and frameworks is a by-product of the reduced status of the object in contemporary art, or a result of the general tendency towards deconstruction within creative practice, each of these artists enlists a rigidity to give form to their ideas."
Gertrude Contemporary - Reason and Rhyme >

Amy's Column 04 - Interior designing the gallery: light and shadow, wall texture, and chandeliers in Los Angeles

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:00:00 GMT

Theatre Objects
The joy of the much talked about and repeatedly reviewed William Leavitt retrospective Theatre Objects, which recently ended at MOCA – was a brazen simplicity coupled with a deep sense of strangeness. Leavitt’s work investigates the alien in the everyday by contemplating the objects, narratives and images that are endlessly rearranged in order to construct the idea of ‘everyday’.

The specific everyday which has been the subject of Leavitt’s consideration, over a career spanning from the late 1960s to the present is Los Angeles. Los Angeles inside and out – his works depict scenes set in the domestic spaces of the city as well as its vast exterior spaces and the fantasy architecture that punctuates the sprawl. Examples of living rooms and private social settings are seen next to depictions of wacky monumental landmarks such as the UFO inspired restaurant at LAX.

Leavitt is most expert when dealing with the zones that border these two sets of spaces. The patios on which private lives open out to fresh air, or views of the facades of modernist houses, with the drama inside hidden by glare as the sun reflects off large picture windows. A further category of spaces explored by Leavitt are those that might be taken as domestic given their content – chairs, curtains, lamps, veneered surfaces – yet have had any real privateness deleted from them through the catalogue-esqe manner in which they are rendered. The settings become ‘types’ rather than individualised places. The private realm of the mid-century Californian living room is show to be deeply impersonal, a space constructed in the commercial realm through the promotion of certain stylistic trends over others.

This retrospective exhibition presents work in a broad range of media, charcoal and pastel drawings, photographic montages with text panels, paintings and sculptural set-like installations. Many of the installations have paintings enveloped within them such as Planetarium Projector 1987, a work which epitomizes Leavitt’s approach –combining set-like elements around an image he has produced himself.

The painting in Planetarium Projector depicts the projector, a complicated piece of equipment with a mass of metal parts transplanted from the planetarium and layered, collage-like, in front of a scrubby desert scene where dusk is descending and streaking layers of red cloud give way to a sky pierced with stars. This setting is the type of place one might imagine the real night sky residing, while viewing a simulation of such a sky from inside a planetarum. In the painting, the desert landscape can only be seen by actively looking past the projector. The purpose of this mechanism is to illustrate a mapped version of a natural phenomenon. The logic required to view the painting therefore mirrors the logic of viewing in a planetarium where the mechanics that are used to produce the viewing content must be actively overlooked, despite their prominence in order for the representation to be successful.

This painting hangs on a wall which is painted sandy beige. The colour defines the area of the installation with the edges ending in expressionistic rolls. Also within this space sits a fake tree, a section of protruding wall on which a narrow curtain hangs, a small silver lamp sitting on the floor casting shadows on to the painted portion of wall, and a small pile of sand which is positioned as though it could have trickled out of the painted desert and onto the gallery floor.

The logic of the installation – a tracing of the construction of theatrics followed by an enjoyment in engaging with a theatrical space – is seen again in the edges of the Planetarium Projector installation. The domestic realm is differentiated from the rest of the gallery’s white walls through a subtle colour zoning. It is at the paint’s rolled edges where the illusion of a separate space dissipates, and it is here that a further layering occurs. Due to the light projected from the small silver lamp, the shadows of a fake tree fall on a fake domestic wall. The objects are fake, but the shadows are real. Leavitt invites the viewer to enter into the narrative of the space and to fully imagine scenarios of what might occur there, while continuing to understand that the space is an illusion.

In the Night Gallery
Most things look good in the Night Gallery. Whether I like the work or not, each iteration of what is shown there, by virtue of being pulled out from the space’s black textured walls by bright spot lighting, seems purposeful and precise. This look, coupled with the initial conceit behind the space – a gallery that is open from 10pm until 2am, and situated next to a late night taco stand – continues, a few dozen shows down the track, to be an engaging alternative to other white cube art spaces. The Night Gallery’s walls are textured with plastered stucco or maybe sprayed concrete, always painted black. The interior brings to mind other sites that art inhabits beyond the white cube – the repurposed industrial space or shop front, the screening room or the cinema.

The swing of day/night – black/white is extended in the recent group show Los Angeles – Switzerland, in which the various works together suggest a sense that the entire galley has had its axis slightly tilted. Tire marks, which are usually only spotted beneath the feet, appear on wall-hung canvases, while a floor slab curves up the wall, rough grey concrete leaning on a rough black.

Leavitt’s concerns with what a stage set might mean in a city full of sound stages and studios seems relevant, especially to the show’s title work, a video piece by Walter Benjamin Smith in which Hollywood celebrity and general Friend of the Arts James Franco stands in front of a blank backdrop reciting a monologue. Franco delivers the part theoretical, part whimsical text in a zonked out manner, oscillating between relaxing and overacting with the flickering eyes of a villain. He frequently nods forward wearing an ‘I’m about to kill you’ grin.

Franco’s delivery, while seeming to withhold any straightforward understanding of the text, conjures up a general feel of captivating theatrics as he asserts that “Recuperation is not to be confused with sustainability”, or when he speaks of the “absorption of a rich variety of trauma” while the viewer stares at his cheek slashed with a fake scar rendered in what looks like lipstick.

In a scene I find strangely memorable from the original Wall Street film (1987), the blonde love interest, a budding interior designer, introduces a layer of ‘hipness’ to a stock broker’s sterile apartment by hanging ‘brick’ wall paper with fake texture in order to bring loft living taste to Downtown. From such an episode it is possible to note that redefining the texture of walls has long been a tactic by which to signal how the parameters of a space can assert to a broader culture how the inhabitants of that space wish to act, or the manner in which they wish their artistic gestures to be read.

Batman: Digital Justice, 2011, Tobias Madison, installation view, The Vanity, Los Angeles

Vanity Box
Walls are also at the centre of the gallery’s character in the new space The Vanity - a space so small that once the door has closed behind you, those with a claustrophobic tendency will feel the walls are closing in. The real life version of the theatrical stage set is the domestic space which has been highly choreographed through interior design, and Tobias Madison’s Batman Digital Justice is a show that blends the hyperbolic tone of the superhero with interior design touches.

Batman Digital Justice is concerned with what was once a new breed of super hero style, the first Batman comic to be computer generated in 1990. Hanging in the center of the room, and taking up almost all of the small space is a home-made chandelier constructed out of different colored bulbs, candy striped twine, planes of plastic, and collaged panels from the Batman comic. The slap dash aesthetic of the construction recalls a style of decoration seen in a child’s tree hut. The space has a general sense of a juvenile wonderland, perhaps the type of place an eight year old might sneak into in order to be able to read their Batman Digital Justice comic over and over again.

As well as the chandelier and posters for Batman Digital Justice which have been plastered directly on to the wall, the small space is filled by thick Swiss accents coming from an audio soundtrack on which the text of the comic is read out in its entirety by a cast of the artist’s friends. The release of Batman Digital Justice marked a cultural turning point where comic books were increasingly passed over for video games with their heightened interactive quality. Seeing the printed-out comic panels while listening to the amateur audio captures the clunky beginnings of this trajectory.

William Leavitt’s strategy of repurposing the melodrama of Hollywood to represent isolated examples of celebritised domestic space in set pieces that can be installed inside the institution can be seen as an interesting precursor to the current trend in Los Angeles exhibition staging –where places of late night gatherings and domestic settings, traditional sites for narrative drama, have become the starting points for exhibition spaces. The walls of The Night Gallery and The Vanity are more charters than props.