All posts by Sue Waymouth
Winter Newsletter 2018
Russ Flatt- Remembering Forward
The Contemporary Benefactors enjoyed an evening with New Zealand photographer, Russ Flatt at Tim Melville Gallery.
Flatt spent more than a decade shooting high-end fashion editorials in London and New York, before launching his art practice in New Zealand in 2013. Linda Tyler from the University of Auckland provides us with an insight into Flatt’s recent exhibition Remembering Forward 2018.
Contemporary Benefactors
Tim Melville and Russ Flatt
Charlotte Swasbrook with Russ Flat
Teen Spirit
by Linda Tyler, Associate Professor and Convenor of Museums and Cultural Heritage The University of Auckland
Staging the evanescent moment of adolescence in evocative settings, Russ Flatt manages to craft his own local vernacular. His assembly of dreamy young people group and fissure in changing combinations, suggesting that the landscape is a transformative force. The images unlock shared experiences of uncertainty which can claim universal relevance.
Concerned with identity formation and individuation, Flatt’s means of animating the process is to represent youth in action. Conventions of portraiture are eclipsed by the demands of performance for the young people in this series as they play out odd little dramas of inclusion and exclusion. We are left none-the-wiser about who these teenagers are.
He treats his subject with care and subtlety, avoiding well-worn clichés: the sole girl in the gang is pictured standing barefoot atop a stone plinth at sunset, but she is no runaway. Dressed in a tartan gym slip she gazes solemnly ahead as if contemplating a distant future.
Trooping away from the camera across a concrete girder and clad only in identical baggy shorts, the line of youths invite contemplation of their uniformity as if in military formation. These are not lost boys – they will soon enough be men able to handle guns.
Exploring the possibilities inherent in this period in life, Flatt’s work is a reminder of a time during which emotions are close to the surface: vulnerability and fortitude play out across the faces, with the child with the bandaged arm held by another two in a tableau of timidity and torment.
Not all the expressions are so easy to read. As these youths test out roles and rituals, we are shown images under construction, identities being created and personalities defined.
The resulting photographs are mysterious and poetic, locating a fine line between naturalism and stylisation, truth and fiction, memory and invention.
Thank you to Tim Melville gallery for hosting the Contemporary Benefactors and allowing us to publish this material.
Lee Mingwei and His Relations : The Art of Participation
Friday 10th February 6.00pm, in the members lounge.
Please join us for an evening with Lee Mingwei in the members lounge. You will meet the artist in an intimate setting, find out more about his practice, and have a chance to ask any questions you may have.
Principal Curator Zara Stanhope will then lead a discussion about participatory art, how it fits into the overall art landscape and what it means for audiences and artists alike.
RSVP to Charlotte Swasbrook : cb.s@xtra.co.nz
Featured image, Lee Mingwei, The mending Project (Installation view), AucklandArt Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2016–17
Cindy Sherman – City Gallery, Wellington
Oscar Enberg
Contemporary Benefactors will have the chance to meet Oscar Enberg and hear about his work at Hopkinson Mossman gallery this evening.
For the second year, contemporary Benefactors are joining with the Chartwell Trust to commission a new site specific sculpture for the North Terrace. Enberg’s work has been selected and the work will be unveiled at a private function for Contemporary Benefactors and The Chartwell Trust, on the 2 December.
Oscar Enberg (b. 1988) lives and works in Auckland. He studied sculpture at ilam School of fine arts in Christchurch and his practice is firmly grounded in formalised sculpture. He creates collections of objects that may at first look like assemblages but are actually customised constructions. Enberg works with fabricators and craft makers to create forms from a variety of different materials, including glass, metal, oyster shell and wood. He was the 2016 recipient of Creative New Zealand’s Visual Art Residency and has spent a year in Berlin.
Chris Sharp and ‘Oscar Enberg’, ‘Nice to meet you’, Mousse 50 , October 2015
Below is an interesting interview between Oscar Enberg and Chris Sharp in Mousse Magazine.
Oscar Enberg’s work feeds on distraction and instability. His sculptures grow like erratic narratives remixing reality, and through the use of a hybrid vocabulary, a minor language that becomes material dialect.
Oscar Enberg (b. 1988) lives and works in Auckland. His installations typically weave together multiple (often prototypical) characters and storylines from film, television, literature, and social histories, which he then exploits as both generators of sculptural forms and construction logic for larger installations. In his recent work, Enberg has explored the role that chance plays in economic systems to reveal fundamental instabilities in those systems. In December 2015 he will present the solo exhibition “The prophet, the wise, the technician, and the Pharisee” at Artspace, Auckland, about a decisive moment in that city’s commercial history; it is a socioeconomic real estate fable synthesized in the structure of the nativity story. Enberg’s recent solo exhibitions include “Jean, Jean et l’enfant sauvage”, Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles (2015), “Sire So-and-So or Richard Pågen”, Johan Berggren, Malmö, Sweden (2014), and “The Pynchons, S01E02: Slouching Towards Dignity”, Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland, New Zealand (2014). Earlier this year, Enberg participated in “Les Règles du Jeu / The Rules of the Game at Centre Pompidou”, Paris.
CHRIS SHARP You make weird, multimedia, highly evocative sculpture/installation that doesn’t seem to fit in with any current trends in contemporary art. Perhaps the exception to this is your use of literary and pop-cultural narrative, which is maybe the best place to start. How does it function in your process?
OSCAR ENBERG For me, narrative operates as a sculptural generator—existing stories that deal with similar material or have a shared history all feed into a sort of content trough. Most often I build a new project around the city or site where the work will first be presented. I think it’s helpful when working to understand the core values of a community, and how they overlap—stories function like cultural barometers, reflecting the politics of the time and place they are produced. In the past I have adopted specific narrative models as a way of shaping exhibitions, too; the formal qualities of poetry, parables and short fiction, as well as the episodic structure of sitcoms,have all been employed as organizational devices.
CS Your description is reminiscent of a cultural anthropologist. But the formalizations of these investigations hardly function as straightforward, critical glosses on the stories themselves; they seem to travel if not great, then anfractuous distances before they end up in one of your shows. How does this happen? Also, could you say a few words about your material vocabulary? With all the oak, wicker, handicrafts, blown glass and other markedly domestic materials, it strikes me as decidedly middle-class.
OE You ’re right, the way I digest and process content isn’t straightforward. It’s usually a very uncomfortable transmission of information into objects and exhibitions: an awkward alchemy perhaps. Last year I made a project in Basel entitled The Good Father and The Rich Uncle that was framed as a kind of warped parable; it was an attempt to encourage a conversation on morality, or family values at least, around the work. The project had several threads: I looked to the trajectory of Monopoly and the original Monopoly Man, Rich Uncle Pennybags; the final season of the US sitcom Roseanne (in which Roseanne dreams the family wins the lottery); the pear brandy Bon Père William; and Hans Arp’s automatic drawings. I used the structure of the family unit, a readymade cast of prototypical characters that have prescribed roles, a dynamic that’s readily understood, universal. As the content threads are manipulated into form, the narratives sort of swell and retract—certain details or forms gain currency, recur, take on qualities of, or piggyback on, these characters. So I can use them to reanimate, to play parts within a sculptural pantomime… At the moment I am particularly drawn to stories about luck, chance and risk, where speculation is involved, tales of how fortunes are won or lost. If the work feels middle-class, it’s because those are the values in high circulation. In making sculpture, I choose to communicate through materials and modes of production that inherently deal with the politics of my content. These materials include carved swamp Kauri, hand-woven willow, blown and stained glass and tapestry—I like crafts that feel almost anachronistic. The artisans I employ are themselves operating in a state of economic precarity and I see them as part of my ensemble cast, as potential protagonists. Then there are elements that contradict this slow labor—recently they might be lottery tickets or throwaway good luck charms, tokens from a more volatile, fast-moving economy. It’s crucial that the work follow its own singular logic, a logic that often feels familiar but unlikely. In that sense, I like to think of myself as operating in the Surrealist tradition—I suppose this links back to your thought on the artist as an anthropologist. James Clifford wrote something about every ethnographer being “something of a Surrealist, a re-inventor and re-shuffler of realities,” and this, albeit pretty outmoded, is kind of what I do.
CS I appreciate what you say about singular logic, which can also be characterized as internal logic or even better, idiosyncratic. Such a method presupposes and embraces transformation as an integral part of the art making process. But then again, I would argue that without transformation there is no real art. So in this case, your work becomes if not self-reflexive, then something of an unlikely allegory of art itself. Hence your “awkward alchemy,” which I also see as of the order of the crucible. All that said, there is an element of world-making in what you do, in the sense of Szeemann’s notion of what he called “Individual Mythology,” with the practices of artists like Beuys, Paul Thek, James Lee Byars, etc. This in the sense that objects or images are never autonomous but always contingent upon larger, self-generated constellations. However, vis-à-vis these predominantly heroic and shamanic figures, your practice seems much more fragmented, not to mention radically secular, even geeky. Perhaps the origin of this fragmentation can be located in the difference between, say, the grand narrative and the hyperlink. Still another parallel that seems to connect your work with these figures is the cultivation of a specific material vocabulary, which tends to transcend the heterogeneity of each individual and narratively complex project, while remaining relatively consistent.
OE I’m pleased you read the practice as somewhat fragmented in relation to the logic of its construction. My relationship to content, and the way I transmit it, is severely distracted, and my inability to follow the arc of a single narrative means that my approach to storytelling is fractured, or fractal. As a result I’ve become increasingly drawn to the chance meetings, moments of happenstance, where histories intersect, and luck becomes generative. I recently became aware of an extended period of correspondence between Samuel Beckett and the American cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller. During the 1950s, while Beckett was living in Paris, the two traded ideas for Bushmiller’s comic strip Nancy… there are these great sketches made in response to Beckett’s ideas for these distinctly absurd situations and characters—basically early storyboards for Endgame and Happy Days. This is exciting to me, to see Beckett’s highly articulated intellectual intention sketched in populist form; I like it when you can see content on the move, popping up in different guises. It’s often in the overlaps that I find my forms—they are mined from the same pit. I guess that is why I have developed a very definite sculptural language—materials stabilize these precarious narrative chains, even if only momentarily. It comes back to that notion of the impossibility of an autonomous image or object, I think. Maybe what I’m doing is building a specific vocabulary by bastardizing existing ones: creating a minor language, a material patois. I’m always looking for images and objects that might articulate my general methodology in a more economical way—a recent example would be the Ball & Claw form. For me, it is a material phrase that has been consistently perverted throughout its history; a traditional Chinese motif, borrowed by 18th-century European Orientalists for its formal qualities, resulting in a strange history of translation, or maybe more accurately mistranslation… I see it as a colonized image. Most recently I used the form in a work titled Silk Road Community Chest, as the handle of a custom, hand-carved ebony and antique ivory corkscrew (itself a form I have repeatedly returned to, as a symbol of physical compression and for its relationship to drinking, as a cartoon of the downward spiral). The work comprised of the corkscrew and a receipt for a donation I made to the Hong Kong Community Chest—was part of a larger material allegory of the Grand Lisboa Casino in Macau. I see the piece as a sort of dramatic reenactment of a very specific event, the annual donation made to the state-run charity by the proprietor of the casino, Stanley Ho, and more generally as a sort rebus for the ivory trade. I suppose it also illustrates another tendency in the practice: a consistent attempt to synthesize a kind of didacticism with something more poetic.
CS Are you then saying that your approach to storytelling is a byproduct of your (limited or even handicapped) attention span? As an indirect consequence, it would seem that your work is not so much about diagnosing the current moment as that of the age of the non sequitur, but rather it seeks to function as an attempt to symbolically negotiate the innumerable non sequiturs of which our moment is fantastically composed, to suture them together and thus invest them with some measure of unlikely coherence—or if not coherence, then a kind of material or Platonic legibility. Also, what do you mean by “a kind of didacticism”? This could potentially imply a number of things, the most obvious being an overt political impetus.
OE You’d be right to suggest that I’m not interested in diagnostics; I’m not so worried about the health of the “contemporary condition.” The distraction, handicap, volatility, is what fuels the work. My content is always average; it’s not hyper-current or on trend, nor is it completely irrelevant. I think of it as lukewarm; a good temperature for breeding. And I’m not interested in didacticism so much in the political sense, but rather its outmoded definition, as a classical form of allegory. It’s another narrative model to pervert; a story hidden in form that instructs as it entertains. I know the term implies an ulterior motive, a political agenda, but each project (each sculpture) is an amalgam of multiple stories, all of which come with their own specific moral strands. There isn’t one discernible lesson, other than instability. If the types of stories I return to tell me anything, it’s that we don’t learn anyway.
by Chris Sharp. Mousse Magazine
Chris Sharp & Oscar Enberg, ‘Nice to Meet You’, Mousse 50, October 2015
*all images courtesy of the artist Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland
Our thanks to Hopkinson Mossman for hosting the Contemporary Benefactors at their gallery.
Date Change For Oscar Enberg at Hopkinson Mossman
With our sincerest apologies we have had to change the date set down for the Oscar Enberg evening hosted by Hopkinson Mossman. Oscar is now going to be away filming a major new work for the later part of this month so we have had to reschedule our event with him for Tuesday 11th October.
We look forward to seeing you there.
Spring Newsletter 2016
Walter’s Prize Walk Through with Natasha Conland
Contemporary Benefactors who braved the chilly evening to attend the walk-through of the Walters Prize finalists were well rewarded. Contemporary Curator Natasha Conland explained the selection process and how the prize is judged, and shared background on the four works on show. The Walters Prize has a reputation for being challenging, and this year is no exception. All four works comprise digital media explorations of how our past relates to our present. The experience of each was hugely enriched by Natasha’s explanation of their back story.
Contemporary Benefactors enjoying the walk through of the Walter’s Prize with Natasha Conland
Our great thanks also go to Ivan Anthony for his entertaining explanations, on the rich collection of paintings and objects, which made up his June show Provenance.
Martin Selman Portrait
2016
Carrara marble (Santiscritti quarry)
570 x 460 x 300mm. Image care of Ivan Anthony Gallery
Martin Selman Self Portrait
2016
Carrara marble (Cervaiole quarry)
130 x 1100 x 280mm. Image care of Ivan Anthony Gallery
Coming up at Auckland Art Gallery this quarter are three new exhibitions. The first is an historic survey of artist Gottfried Lindauer. The Maori Portraits: Gottfried Lindauer’s New Zealand, with over 120 portraits, is a unique occasion to view the work of this important figure in the Gallery’s establishment and history, opening night 23 October. This is followed by an exhibition of Taiwanese contemporary artist, Lee Mingwei. Lee Mingwei and his relations: The Art of Participation, developed by Mami Kataoka for Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and adapted for Auckland Art Gallery, opens Friday 4 November. Then on Friday 26 November the survey exhibition Ann Shelton: Dark Matters opens in the Chartwell Galleries and offer a fresh prospective on this prominent New Zealand photographer.
Key Events: September to November 2016
Meet Artist Oscar Enberg
Tuesday 11 October from 6.30pm
Hopkinson Mossman
Auckland Artist Oscar Enberg has been commissioned to present the next North Terrace sculpture opening early in December. Please join in this opportunity to hear Oscar talk about the background of his work, meet him and ask any questions you may have about his process and practice.
Oscar Enberg Storyboard for The Sunset, 2013 swamp kauri, oil paint, polyurethane, digital print on aluminium, copper tack 500 x 500 x 100mm
Oscar Enberg Goodluck for Thomas, Antoine and Louis, 2014 ash, kauri, mahogany, Aladdin Casino gaming token, brass fitting 438 x 362 x 184 mm overall
Oscar Enberg the prophet, the wise, the technician and the Pharisee, 2015 installation view: Artspace, Auckland photo: Sam Hartnett
North Terrace Opening
Oscar Enberg: Troubles de la croissance (der ursprung des pendels)
Friday 2 December 6pm
Please join us on Auckland Art Gallery’s North Terrace for a glass of Christmas champagne to celebrate the unveiling of the new North Terrace sculpture made possible by support from the Contemporary Benefactors and the Chartwell Trust.
Please contact Charlotte Swasbrook, for more information
For more information on the Walter’s Prize go to the Auckland Art Gallery website
http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/exhibition/the-walters-prize-2016
We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tämaki. Your donation is going towards contemporary art exhibitions, publications and extensions to the Auckland Art Gallery public programme.
Winter Newsletter 2016
It has been a busy quarter again, with an inspiring lunchtime talk from photographer Fiona Pardington that included plenty of illuminating anecdotes about her photographic career. Most recently we supported the exhibition Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America in enabling a number of artists to come to New Zealand to install work and present in the opening visitor programme. Key among these was renowned Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, who gave an unforgettable keynote lecture on the evening of 3 May. There was an opportunity to meet Alfredo that evening and he and other artists at the stakeholder preview of Space to Dream on Thursday 5 June. Our support also made it possible for the works of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark to come to Auckland, and that evening we saw her Sensory Masks and suit, The I and the You, in action!
Charlotte Swasbrook in Lygia Clark Mascara Sensorial mask
Other stand-out events included artists’ talks over the opening weekend, which were attended by 674 visitors. The exhibition is receiving excellent reviews and recommendations, so please spread the word about the three South American themed weekends to come on 16/17 July, 20/21 August and 10/11 September. Be sure to check the Art Gallery website for details.
Key events July — September 2016
Dealer Gallery Visit
Thursday 23 Jun 6.30pm Ivan Anthony Gallery
Several of the Contemporary Benefactors joined esteemed Auckland gallerist Ivan Anthony who will introduced our Contemporary Benefactors group to his latest exhibition Provenance, which included ‘old masters’ in the company of New Zealand contemporary artists. This is the latest in our series of private introductions to Auckland dealer galleries.
The Walters Prize 2016 – An Introduction
Fri 5 Aug 6.30—8pm Auckland Art Gallery, Level 2, Members Lounge
Join exhibition curator Natasha Conland for an exclusive introduction to the Walters Prize 2016, New Zealand’s Contemporary Art Prize.
As the biennial industry award for contemporary art, this exhibition and prize nomination is often the most talked about event in our exhibition calendar. Come along for a glass of wine, an exhibition tour, and a behind- the-scenes account of the exhibition and nominated artists.
The Walters Prize Dinner
We have a date! The biennial Walters Prize Dinner will be held at the Gallery on Friday 30 September. Please await the press release and letter of invitation for more news on the most prestigious black tie award dinner
in our calendar. Make sure you don’t miss out on this opportunity. Get in early to purchase tickets or your table.
Please contact andrea.ord@aucklandartgallery.com for more information.
As a Contemporary Benefactor you will also receive invitations to exclusive openings run by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Please contact Charlotte Swasbrook if you are not receiving these invitations cswasbrook@xtra.co.nz
We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Your donation is going towards contemporary exhibitions, publications and extensions to
the Auckland Art Gallery public programme.
Space to Dream: Recent Art From South America
Space to Dream: Recent Art Of South America
The contemporary Benefactors enjoyed an exclusive pre-view of Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America, at the Auckland Art Gallery.
Co-curators Beatriz Bustos Oyanedel from Chile and Dr Zara Stanhope, Principal Curator at Auckland Art Gallery, walked us through the exhibition, along with South American Artists, Alfredo Jaar, Joaquin Sánchez and Máximo Corvalán.
Space to Dream is the first major exhibition in Australasia to introduce, in depth, the art of South America. The exhibition reveals how South American artists see a social significance for their work and how as rebels and revolutionaries, dreamers and poets, they have challenged, embraced, explained or transformed their realities, lives, cultures and spaces from the 1960s to today.
Space to Dream includes the work of 41 artists and collectives across six countries – Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay. The exhibition includes senior figures internationally recognised for their contribution to art as well as younger figures including Lygia Clark, Juan Fernando Herrán, Alfredo Jaar, Marcos Lopez, Ernesto Neto, Hélio Oiticia, Bernardo Oyarzún, Lotty Rosenfeld, Martín Sastre and many more.
Oyanedel says, “it is a space of creativity, a space of possibility and a space about the cultural history of our region. It is a space to dream and a space to build society. “
Stanhope says “The exhibition has been curated to be seen as a whole and not chronological, or by Artist, Country or a particular subject matter. Although, there are a number of different themes, which run through the whole exhibition. There is a sense of memories that are being redrawn and resurfacing. There is also a great deal of humour and positivity in the works. There are different themes throughout the exhibition, such as revolution, memories, cultural origins, the blending of different ethnicities, through to the idea of new possibilities and new horizons.”
Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America is on from 7 May – 16 September. With masks and clothes to try on and artwork you can touch and smell, it is also an exhibition that will engage the whole family.
Ben Waymouth wearing Lydia Clark’s Mascara Sensorial mask. In front of demian Schopf, La Nave (Ch’uta Mariachi) 2015
Charlotte Swasbrook in Lygia Clark Mascara Sensorial mask
This exhibition was made possible with the help of the Contemporary Benefactors who contributed to the funding of Space to Dream: Recent art from South America.
For more information on Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America, visit the Auckland Art Gallery website
http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/exhibition/space-to-dream
Fiona Pardington
The Contemporary Benefactors enjoyed an afternoon with Fiona Pardington and Auckland Art Gallery Senior Curator New Zealand and Pacific Art, Ron Brownson.
During the exclusive interview we were lucky to get an insight into Fiona’s work and the in-depth research and preparation that goes into each photograph. Fiona kept us entertained with her wit, intelligence and passion. We heard about her voracious appetite for reading and how trips to the museum with her beloved Grandmother Dorothy, had stirred her interest in Museums and objects. Fiona walked us through the exhibition Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation, which is currently showing at the Auckland Art Gallery. Behind each photo there is a story from the Kea found on the side of the road (David Kea Wings (2015), the luck in finding old, crushed silk flowers at the Porte de Clingancourt flea market in Paris which she steamed back into life, (Stuart Cameron’s Rose 2011) to the peculiar and macabre objects found at various Museums in Paris, which feature in We Dream of Gentle Morpheus (2011).
Ron Brownson asked Fiona about the title “A Beautiful Hesitation”. Fiona answered, “I pick up titles like things off the side of the road. I will look at groups of words in a quote and take them out of context and find meaning in them”. She described photography’s power to pause time and transcend the conditions of the material world. Her practice breathes life into the objects she encounters. As Brownson says “you have breathed oxygen into those casts” as she has done for all her photographs.
There are more than 100 photographs on display in the Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. A Beautiful Hesitation is a comprehensive presentation of 30 years of Fiona Pardington’s practice. Revealing the key elements that have helped to shape her work, the exhibition celebrates one of New Zealand’s most notable photographers.
An extract from the beautiful new book Published by Victoria University Press in association with Baker+Douglas and in conjunction with City Gallery Wellington and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation
Published by Victoria University in association with Baker & Douglas, 2016
Taking a photograph is like tilting at windmills. It’s taking on the universe. Fiona Pardington
Fiona Pardington considers each of her photographs to be ‘a sovereign world’, offering an uneasy, dream-like experience akin to being placed under hypnotic suggestion. She uses the phrase ‘a beautiful hesitation’ to describe photography’s power to arrest time and to alter our relationship with what it both places under our gaze and keeps from it. A Beautiful Hesitation is the most comprehensive survey of Pardington’s work to date spanning thirty years of her practice. It delves deeply into the photographer’s archive presenting many of her early images for the first time. These photographs bring forth challenging, disarming and affecting views of Aotearoa New Zealand.
From an analogue process of exquisitely realised black and white images to digital photographs that are rich with colour, Pardington’s oeuvre traverses themes from the spirituality that underpins Māori customs and the metaphysical world to sexual and cultural politics. Her cornerstones are the abject, the discarded, the precious and the wounded, and the deep ties she maintains with her Kāi Tahu heritage.
The book Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation is available at the gallery shop or through the Baker Douglas website www.bakerdouglas.co.nz . Alongside the images are newly commissioned essays by: Aaron Lister, Hana O’Regan, Susan Best, Kriselle Baker, Zara Stanhope, Ron Brownson and Peter Shand. Also included are a substantial interview by Andrew Paul Wood and an archive section of significant earlier texts.
If members would like Fiona to sign a copy of the book, we are happy to arrange it. Please email suewaymouth@xtra.co.nz
Caitlin Wright, Fiona Pardington, Danielle Harper
Sue Waymouth, Fiona Pardington
About Fiona Pardington
Fiona Pardington (b.1961) is of Scottish (Clan Cameron of Erracht) and Māori (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, or Ngāti kahungunu) descent. Her work is held in major public collections in Aotearoa New Zealand and abroad, including Musée du Quai Branly, Paris and the National Gallery Canada, Ottawa. Pardington has exhibited widely throughout Australasia and beyond, including the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010) and the Ukraine Biennale (2012). She has completed the requirements for a Doctor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland and has received many fellowships and residences, including Moët & Chandon Fellowship (France) in 1991-1992, the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago in 1996 and 1997,the Kāi Tahu Residency at Otago Polytecnic in 2006. In 2001, Pardington became an Art Foundation Laureate. She is represented by Starkwhite, Auckland.
For More Information:
Anthony Bryt wrote an article in Metro 1 March 2016 about Fiona and the exhibition. http://www.metromag.co.nz/culture/arts-fest/fiona-pardington-grey-areas/
Special Preview for Contemporary Benefactors- Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show
Rhana Devenport, Director of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki warmly invites Contemporary Benefactors to a special preview of Necessary Distraction: A painting Show.
Friday 27 November 2015
4.30-6pm
Members Lounge, Level 2
Please also join us for the official opening at 6-8pm in the North Atrium
RSVP essential by Friday 20 November
Email: rsvp@aucklandartgallery.com
Phone +64 9 890 2281
Discover a new vigour in recent New Zealand painting in this ambitious multi-artist exhibition. Responding to the question ‘What can painting offer that other art forms cannot?’, the artworks selected and commissioned for this survey share a focus on material and form, and are deliberately open ended.
Through suggestion and proposition, the artists invite us into conversations that, rather than being constrained by the ties of narrative painting, are speculative and forward-looking. Experience diverse work by 20 established and emerging painters and witness a future for painting that’s still in the making.
The exhibition runs from Saturday 28 November 2015 – Monday 4 April 2016
Text provided by Auckland Art Gallery
http://www.aucklandartgallery.com
Jonathan Ward Knox, Hardly Held Lightly
The Contemporary Benefactors and members of the Chartwell Trust, enjoyed a sunny evening on the sculpture terrace surrounded by Jonathan Ward Knox’s new work, Hardly Held Lightly, a trio of super-sized sculptures, spun in the shape of giant spider webs.
The sculpture terrace at the Auckland Art gallery comes alive with John Ward Knox’s new site-responsive work, Hardly Held Lightly. Ward Knox transformed more than a kilometre of industrial chain into three vast weavings, imitating the webs of a giant spider. Joining the tree-tops of Albert Park to the building’s eaves, Ward Knox plays with a key aspect of our 2011 redevelopment – linking our Gallery building to the park.
Jane Browne, Nicky Pennington, Sue Waymouth, Kriselle Baker, Charlotte Swasbrook.
The webs are not drawn from ancient cultural symbols of death or decay, or even Halloween. Instead, Ward Knox draws on an arachnid’s sensibility, by modelling the complex decisions about shape, link and length required to create a natural spider’s net. This intricate form of pattern-making which is rarely closely observed, hangs in tremendous weight and outsized scale and connects us to the natural beauty of the park.
This exciting installation is the latest in a series of commissions by emerging New Zealand artists for the level 2 space, thanks to Chartwell Trust and the Contemporary Benefactors.
24 October 2015 – 5 June 2016 Edmiston North Sculpture Terrace, level 2, amphitheatre and Albert Park
Image credit: John Ward Knox, Hardly Held Lightly, 2015, steel chain. Commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2015. Supported by the Chartwell Trust and the Contemporary Benefactors
Text credit; Auckland Art Gallery
Collecting Art Talk with Natasha Conland
The Auckland Art Gallery invites Contemporary Benefactors to a talk on, ‘an introduction to collecting art’ by Curator Contemporary Art, Natasha Conland.
TALK: COLLECTING ART
Thursday 11 June, 6–8pm
Members lounge, Level 2
‘Let’s talk about collecting’. So, you’re thinking about developing your art collection or going in a new direction? Are there questions you’ve always wanted to put to a professional, but were too afraid to ask? Are there grey areas of the art world you want to clarify? Come along to a light-hearted talk by Curator Contemporary Art, Natasha Conland on collecting contemporary art. Not just for the brave or obsessed, but also for the curious. Have a glass of wine and some nibbles. Enjoy hearing about buying art – insights and accidents!
Natasha has led the development of contemporary art in New Zealand’s two major public art collections for 14 years. She has also visited major museums of contemporary art internationally to meet with colleagues about collecting from TATE to the New Museum, through Asia and the Middle East, and has
visited many private collections during her professional life.
RSVP for numbers to krisellebaker@gmail.com 0273160332
Richard Serra
Feature Artist: Richard Serra
By Sophie Wallace
“What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are.” –Richard Serra
David Zwirner New York is currently exhibiting a new major installation in forged weatherproof steel by Richard Serra. Entitled Equal, the installation comprises a series of paired stacked cubes. Weighing at forty-tonnes each, the gallery was required to engage hydraulic gantries, bridge rollers and cranes to install them. David Zwirner, who was concerned about the weight of the steel cracking the gallery’s cement floor, had a sculptural on-ramp installed for the duration of the show, which acts as a bridge to lift the weight of the sculptures from the foundations.
Serra, who has been working with sculpture for more than thirty years, was prompted to consider “ways of relating movement to material and space” after watching contemporary dancers as a young artist in New York in the late 1960s. His series, Torqued Ellipses, on long-term view at Dia:Beacon, continues the artist’s exploration of movement and space through sculpture. Weighing at over twenty-tonnes each, the two-inch thick rolled steel plates spiral inwards, so that the viewer is taken on a journey towards the centre of each piece, confronted with a dramatic tension between one’s bodily awareness and one’s vision. Comprised of sixteen-foot sheets of steel—the maximum size available—there were only two rollers in existence that could execute the task of producing the sculptures.
New Zealand is fortunate to have been graced with Richard Serra’s presence by virtue of his Te Tuhirangi Contour installation at Gibbs Farm. The large-scale site-specific sculpture contains 56 Corten steel plates that follow a single contour line across the landscape.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938. Serra’s first solo exhibition was held at the Galleria La Salita, Rome in 1966. His first solo museum exhibition was held at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1970. Since then, Serra’s work has been the subject of multiple solo exhibitions across the world. In 2005, the Guggenheim Museum Bibao permanently installed eight large-scale works by Serra and in 2007, the Museum of Modern Art, New York presented a major retrospective of his work.
Richard Serra: Equal is on view at 537 West 20th Street, New York through the 24th of July.
Thank you to Sophie Wallace, who is based in New York, for providing this article for the Contemporary Benefactors.
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