Week 3 - The Walters Prize 2010

a) Saskia Leek
b) Fiona Connor
c) Dan Arps
d) Alex Monteith



This week we will be visiting the Auckland Art Gallery to view, research and write about the artists selected for the Walters Prize 2010. Discuss the work in the gallery with your tutors and other students and answer the following questions.



1. What is the background to the Walters Prize?
The Walters Prize is a biennial award for New Zealand artists who have made an outstanding contribution to the visual arts in the previous two years. Honouring the life and artistic legacy of Gordon Walters (1919 – 1995), the award was founded by the Auckland Art Gallery in 2002. The prize includes NZ$50,000 and an all expense paid trip to New York to exhibit at Saatchi & Saatchi’s world headquarters.
(http://nzcontemporary.com/contemporary-art-prizes/the-walters-prize/)

2. List the 4 selected artists for 2010 and briefly describe their work.

a) Saskia Leek, Yellow is the Putty of the World
“Whitish yellows and whitish blues contribute to the distinctive colouring of Saskia Leek’s recent work. This palette has evolved from paintings that respond directly to the look and the mood of sun-faded prints and Paint By Numbers pastels, and is treated in the exhibition Yellow is the Putty of the World more clearly as a subject in itself. Leek’s painting has long honoured the appeals of popular images. Here she acknowledges a pathos in the generic nature of any picture of a sailing ship, say, or bowl of fruit, and aligns it with the now equally familiar idea of abstraction. She does not strain to make a point about supposedly ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, about modernism or mass culture. Instead, these works demonstrate the fascination that remains in such over-determined starting points for the act of painting, refreshing and personalising them. Combining subtlety and accessibility, they are paintings about painting, but also just as much paintings about the world, that painting, after all, is a part of.”

b)Fiona Connor, Something Transparent (please go round the back)
“Echoing, and initially installed within, the high-profile window space of Michael Lett’s dealer gallery on Karangahape Road, Fiona Connor’s intriguing sculptural proposition Something Transparent (please go round the back) makes the most of the unsettling potential of the double-take. Positioning multiple reproductions of the glass façade and public entrance to the gallery in situ one behind the next, Connor’s work is both visually captivating and compelling conceptually. Literally sidelining its audience and fragmenting the commercial space of the work’s initial host with layer upon layer of plate glass, Something Transparent (please go round the back) proves itself as disarming as it is illusory and alluring. With an ongoing interest in how spaces and objects operate within specific communities, this playfully sophisticated work continues Connor’s investigations into the multivalent site of the art gallery by again harnessing the potency and enigmatic duplicity of the replica.”

c) Dan Arps, Explaining Things
“Where the art stops and the ordinary world starts is a point Dan Arps often blurs with his work. He has made careful formal gestures with materials as banal as breakfast cereal and sheets of newspaper - things a long way from the everyday idea of art. At the same time, he has made gestural paintings and elaborate objects on plinths – almost parodies of a clichéd idea of art. In Explaining Things, the expressive and the deadpan are jammed together in this way. Chunks of mass cultural detritus –You Tube clips, furniture, ornaments and posters – are reworked into what sometimes appear to be illegibly personal artifacts. As the title hints, all manner of cultural stuff sampled in this precise jumble of images and objects might relate to our desires for things to be explained, including art.”

d) Alex Monteith, Passing Manoeuvre with two motorcycles and 584 vehicles for two-channel video
“What we are seeing is illegal according to the New Zealand Road Code, but a familiar sight for commuters on Auckland roads nonetheless: motorbikes threading their way between lanes of slow-moving traffic. The action is defamiliarised by being presented to us from two perspectives at once, as one camera looks forward and another looks back, from one bike to another. As in many of her works, Alex Monteith has taken advantage of contemporary technology to update the kinds of image-making experiments undertaken by structuralist filmmakers in the 1960s, deriving a formal composition from the action of vehicles. Here, the apparently simple double view of the relative motion of the motorbikes and the other traffic comes to life as an experience as it confounds our sense of time. Where is the present moment in the image we are offered? Our grasp of movement and space is challenged by Monteith’s elegant abstraction.”
(http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/emerging-artists-line-walters-prize-122233)

3. Who are the jury members for 2010?
Jon Bywater - Programme Leader, Critical Studies at Elam School of Fine Art, The University of Auckland.
Rhana Devenport - Director, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth
Leonhard Emmerling - Visual Arts Adviser, Goethe Institute, Munich, Germany, former Director, ST PAUL St, AUT University
Kate Montgomery - Director, Physics Room, Christchurch
(http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/events/2010/july/the-walters-prize-2010)

4. Who is the judge for 2010 and what is his position in the art world?
The appointed judge for the Auckland Art Gallery 2010 is the “highly respected former-director of London’s Tate Modern, Vicente Todoli.” (Judge for Walters Prize announced, 2010)
Todoli has led the Tate Modern through most of his time and from 1989-96, he was the chief curator and artistic director for The Valencia Institute for Modern Art (IVAM).
Todoli has organized and curated well-known exhibitions of modern and contemporary art around the globe.
“he has worked at New York's Whitney Museum, the IVAM in Valencia, and the Serralves Contemporary Art Museum in Oporto, as well as working alongside the ICA in Amsterdam and the Reina Sofía Museum.” (thinkSpain, 2010)
(http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU1006/S00173.htm)
(http://www.thinkspain.com/news-spain/17799/valencias-vicente-todoli-to-leave-london-tate-modern-in-summer)

5. Who would you nominate for this years Walter's Prize, and why? Substantiate
you answer by outlining the strengths of the artists work. How does this relate
to your interests in art? What aspect of their work is successful in your opinion,
in terms of ideas, materials and/or installation of the work?
















Fiona Connor, Something Transparent (please go round the back)

I really like this work because my major is interior and architecture design in korea. so I am interested about installation and when I saw works in The walters prize 2010, this work gave to me strong impression.
That is amazing pieces of public art in Auckland. I've never seen about like that before. it was made with mysterious space which was set by using a piece of trickery done with mirrors by Fiona Connor. Her work's material which can reflect to opposite side, can make marvelous space and we can feel that as if we are in space which has many flanks at her work, one space. Seventeen glass windows and doors are presented long distance that we can't go. After I saw her work, I realized that when I think about space design not only big of huge space can be good. Small space can make big space and small space have hidden many spaces like her work.


6. Comment on other blogs from your ALVC group to agree or disaee with other people,always backing up your answer with clearly stated reasons.