Telecom Prospect 2004: New Art New Zealand

Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to Telecom Prospect 2004: New Art New Zealand.

City Gallery Wellington is proud to present this vibrant exhibition project in partnership with the Adam Art Gallery, the New Zealand Film Archive and Massey University. The second exhibition in a series which surveys contemporary art in this country, Telecom Prospect 2004 provides a glimpse of the most exciting and compelling artworks produced in the past three years. It’s a sample which dips into something much larger – broad enough in scope to capture the diversity of art-making in Aotearoa New Zealand today, intimate enough to offer a personal view.

Spanning multiple Wellington venues, Telecom Prospect 2004 activates the city with a celebration of the visual arts. Each venue has a distinctive flavour. In addition to enabling a wide range of artistic practice to be showcased, working in partnership has allowed for new ideas, opinions and experiences to be brought into the mix. Each venue of Telecom Prospect 2004 can be seen as a complete show, yet at the same time each suite of work can also be thought of as just one sentence in a much longer conversation.

Quirky, eclectic and opinionated, the Prospect series aims to open up conversation, acting as a forum for lively debate. It’s an invitation to City Gallery’s audience of Wellingtonians and visitors to participate and engage, question and explore. Telecom Prospect 2004 provides a platform for a generous range of voices to be heard, celebrating the pluralism and fluidity of our times. It’s an exhibition which reflects that in 2004 no one single blueprint for art-making exists – artists today are marked by their independence and fervour, yet are also aware of being part of an ever-shifting and evolving artistic community.

Responding to this diversity of artistic practice Telecom Prospect 2004 presents major work by 43 artists, encompassing painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, video, film and computer software. Artworks by senior artists are placed alongside those of younger artists with whom their practice reveals strong connections, acknowledging the ongoing cross-pollination of ideas across generations. Artists from throughout New Zealand are included – from Auckland to Port Chalmers, Great Barrier Island to Porirua. As well, like many New Zealanders today, several of the artists are based outside New Zealand, although they continue to return to New Zealand to exhibit their work.

Telecom Prospect 2004 is an unruly beast, designed to sprawl across the city like an exuberant infection, through galleries, cinema, a hall, a local bus service, your cell phone, your home PC. It has a celebratory quality, an inclusive nature, and would like to welcome you in. It’s an exhibition with a sociable bent. This is a show located in something quite real: it’s about people, networks, relationships and conversations.

Continuing its space invasion into a virtual existence, the exhibition is extended by an online publication, available at www.telecomprospect2004.org.nz. Containing images and texts, critical commentary on the exhibition and a range of topical and pithy opinion pieces from local, national and international commentators regarding the broader state of the arts today, the publication is designed to open the exhibition to the widest possible audience.

City Gallery Wellington would like to thank the many private collectors and public institutions who have generously loaned works; the various writers and scholars who have contributed their ideas; our partner venues: the Adam Art Gallery, the New Zealand Film Archive, and Massey University; the Telecom Prospect 2004 Advisory Panel; the sponsors who have supported the project including the exhibition’s Principal Sponsor, Telecom New Zealand; Eyework Design and Production Ltd; Alto; Magnum Mac; our core funders – the Wellington Museums Trust and Wellington City Council; and Creative New Zealand for their investment and support of the exhibition’s programme of public events. Special thanks are due to the artists, who have so generously contributed their time, their works and their goodwill to the Telecom Prospect 2004 project.

Emma Bugden, Curator, Telecom Prospect 2004: New Art New Zealand

gallery 1

Consider this as the portrait gallery of Telecom Prospect 2004. The works in this gallery span a broad range of ideas about the body, sexuality and sensuality, beauty, fashion and desire. There is a narcissistic flavour to some of these works, a focus on both notions of the self and the wider role of the artist, while other works refer back to historical modes of depicting the human body.

Ian Scott is positioned here as the godfather of naughty-but-nice pop, his Playboy pin-ups posing provocatively next to famous modernist paintings, as though they were selling us cars in a showroom. Scott has been a major figure in New Zealand painting since his early days as one of the few local pop artists in the 1960s. His painting today continues to be stamped with a celebration of the ordinary and the banal and with a wilful pleasure in the ridiculous.

Like Scott, Liz Maw and Scott Eady share an interest in the representation of the body. Drawing on themes from ancient mythology, Maw reworks these to create her own stories in paintings which exude a sleek sensuality. In Honeymoon on the Pigroot, Eady’s ongoing interest in masculinity and male stereotypes leads him to investigate Dunedin, a southern city caught between its rural heritage and its rising reputation as a fashion centre. Eady’s work moves between notions of High Country and High Fashion; his Southern Man wears a Drizabone, but it's made by fashion designer Nicholas Blanchett, and the horse he leads is an enormous My Little Pony toy.

Wayne Youle’s 12 Shades of Bullshit is a response to representations of Maori in early New Zealand art. In this work, Youle takes portraits of Maori by early European artists and reduces them to simple silhouettes. He notes that ‘when traced into a simple outline, the forms not only change gender, but ethnicity also, with white-man noses, jawbones and foreheads’.

In his three works, Steve Carr explores the different roles of the artist, as both detached observer and active participant. In Dive Pool Carr assumes a Jacques Cousteau-like persona. Although the artist, clad in scuba gear, is clearly visible in the underwater world that he documents, his place in this work is as a viewer and recorder. In the two works at the entrance to City Gallery, however, Carr abandons this detachment and jumps boots and all into riotous children’s games, suggesting with his enthusiastic engagement that artists might be the last adults to retain a sense of child-like play and wonder. Also exploring the theme of childhood is Paul Johns, whose four photographs form a charming tableau reflecting on memory and youth.

While the original aim of portraiture may have been the production of a good likeness, contemporary artists have played around with the conventions of this genre. Yvonne Todd, for example, subverts the traditions of commercial and studio photography. Todd’s new works for Telecom Prospect 2004 display her current interest in injecting her art with ill health and malaise, with photographs that explore ideas of chemical overload and toxicity.

Underlying the glossy fun in this gallery, a discernible sense of unease runs through some of the works. We hear it in the shrillness of Jacqueline Fraser’s drawings, the high-pitched squeals of the society women whose lifestyles she depicts (‘Really, I was a teeny bit late because my make-up man was useless’) and her backhanded jab of titling each of the works after anti-depressant medications. Similarly, Peter Robinson’s googly-eyed creature is both cute and revolting, a grotesquely funny reminder of what long-term cigarette use really does to your insides.

Two works in this selection interact directly with the gallery spaces. Complementing a major suite of paintings at the Adam Art Gallery, here Darryn George has transposed a large abstract design directly onto the wall, creating a skin of colour that hugs the architecture. In the Gallery foyer Sara Hughes’ dots run riot, spreading like a hyperactive virus and creating a hallucinogenic and trance-like effect.

gallery 2

The works selected for this gallery demonstrate an interest in history, memory, real and imagined places. This is a space intrigued with the surreal, beauty and dreaming. It’s a space which asks you to take a breath and contemplate.

Lonnie Hutchinson's exquisitely crafted wall-mounted sculpture Sista7 creates a play of light and shadow through seven cones constructed from building paper cut into a series of unfurling koru patterns. The shapes of the work and the sculpture’s title refer back to the seven peaks of the Port Hills in Lyttleton. Hutchinson has said that she feels ‘passionately fortunate that I make art in such an environment. For me this is a spiritual journey of returning to the landscape of my tipuna.’

Peter Madden has also had the scissors out, building an entire miniature city from pictures carefully cut from the pages of National Geographic, creating a fantastical world which unfolds like a paper fan. Maryrose Crook’s paintings present mysterious worlds filled with personal iconography, rendered with the most intricate detail. Complexly layered, her symbols and imagery tease us with their implied codes and elusive beauty. Shigeyuki Kihara could also be seen as creating new worlds by inserting herself into Samoan history, reinterpreting myths with herself as the central character. The dreamy exteriors of her photographs belie their edgy nature, as Kihara, a Fa’fafine (a Samoan term which translates most closely as transsexual), continues to explore issues of sexual and cultural identity.

This room may offer time-out for the viewer, but it’s not so much an escape from reality as a hopeful take on what the world could be. In her sculpture Welcome to Paradise, Bekah Carran provides a glimpse of nature in the midst of the urban sprawl, drawing on time spent working on a community art project for psychiatric outpatients. In Carran’s own words, her art provides something ‘hopeful and gentle, tinged with idealism, sentimentality and sadness’. To assist the contemplative mood of the piece, she offers a park bench as an invitation to viewers to sit before the work and reflect. Shona Rapira Davies’ simple ceramic figures paddle their driftwood waka through invisible seas. Made in the midst of fervent debate regarding the ownership of the seabed and foreshore, the work is also a personal response to the artist’s family history.

gallery 3

If there is an idea that binds the hubbub of works in this gallery, it is that they grapple with reality. Located firmly in the everyday, the works take an interest in the wider world – the environment, social groupings and behaviours, science, architecture, medicine and the interesting banalities of real life. Some of these works may seem confrontational, but they also display a sense of wilful humour in their dissection of our lives and environments.

Neil Pardington’s quiet photographs explore the relationship between the individual and the institution. Of Te Whare O Rangiora (Chair), a photograph taken at a disused psychiatric hospital in Porirua, Pardington has said, ‘it struck me as a cry for help. I mean, the space itself was so desolate, you could never imagine actually recovering from whatever ailment you were suffering from.’ Wayne Barrar’s carefully observed photographs document what occurs when humans inhabit the most inhospitable areas of the world and the kind of desperate domesticity that they impose on that alien landscape.

Recycling the detritus of both urban and rural life, Don Driver overlays a basic tarpaulin with sacks stamped with the word ‘Ozone’. As well as referring to the local coffee company ‘Ozone’, the work’s title reminds us of Driver’s ongoing concern about the fragile state of our environment. Like Driver, Dick Frizzell’s career has been marked by an interest in mixing up imagery and material from high and low culture. In Please keep us safe while we sleep by the fire, Frizzell takes a trip down memory lane as he returns from Auckland to Hawkes Bay, collecting ‘the usual ephemera and bumph’ – signs, logos, advertising characters – as he goes and welding them together into a great glorious car crash of imagery.

This gallery also features several large-scale installation works. Artists’ collective et al. continue their interest in social and institutional critique, here creating an environment of sensory overload for viewers to stand in and consider. Dan Arps reflects wistfully on the era of hippies and communes. His rich and chaotic installation centres on wonky versions of domestic pottery and his reflections on architectural pioneer Buckminster Fuller’s energy-conserving geodesic domes. Warren Olds and Douglas Kelaher’s collaborative work From Holland is an act of homage to the clean lines and utilitarian materials of Scandinavian design. Boldly wrapping around three gallery walls, their work extends into the gallery reading room.

Floating above the gallery foyer, Sarah Jane Parton’s DVD projection She’s So Usual is a strangely touching music video. Dressed in a 1980s-era ball gown, the artist sings along karaoke-style to the Cyndi Lauper song ‘Time After Time’ from her 1983 album She’s So Unusual. Parton performs with the self-conscious posturing of a teenager in front of the bedroom mirror, staging an act that hovers between timid uncertainty and precocious guile.

On entering Ronnie van Hout’s work, a shack that has been built inside the gallery, it becomes obvious that we are in a prison cell from which the artist/prisoner has escaped, leaving behind a dummy figure to fool the guard. However, the artist keeps mysteriously reappearing to taunt the guard, leaving a virtual trace of his whereabouts as he posts messages from exotic locales. ‘I was attracted to the idea‘, says van Hout, ‘that it would be possible for me to interact with the work when I was away from the gallery, increasing the image of the escaped artist, somewhere in the world, on the run.’

Phil Price delves into the laboratory in his sculpture Beethoven’s Hair, a large-scale replica of a human head, carefully dissected to expose the internal workings of the brain. Fascinated by scientific discovery, Price explores the impact new developments – particularly in cloning and genetics – are having on the world around us. Not so much a science project as a DIY craft piece, Sean Kerr’s work The Mountain sits in the middle of the gallery floor. Two ‘googly’ eyes stare out ludicrously from the wood veneer mountain, following viewers as they walk through the gallery. It’s the kind of absurdity that children’s author Quentin Blake might have come up with to inhabit a magical forest.