The Walters Prize 2008
Exhibition of Finalists
Auckland Art Gallery
Until November 23

The finalists in New Zealand’s richest and most prestigious contemporary art are now exhibiting at the Auckland Art Gallery.

The $50,000 Walters Prize, similar to the Tate’s Turner Prize, is awarded for an outstanding contribution to contemporary art in New Zealand in the past two years.

The four finalists are; Edith Amituanai for her exhibition, Déjeuner 2007, shown at Anna Miles Gallery, Lisa Reihana for Digital Marae 2007, shown at Govett-Brewster Gallery, John Reynolds for Cloud 2006, shown at the Biennale of Sydney and Peter Robinson for ACK 2006, shown at Artspace, Auckland.

Auckland Art Gallery Director Chris Saines said the Walters Prize set out to focus on the contemporary work “but it unconditionally celebrates the contemporary artist.
“Eight years and four prize exhibitions on, the artists who have participated in the prize are, without exception, continuing to push out and to re-shape contemporary New Zealand art. It has proven an incredibly reliable core sampler of our best new work.”

The work of the four artists is concerned with cultures in transition.

They look at how contemporary Maori, Pacific Islanders and Europeans interact with other cultures and reflect on their own.

Edith Amituanai's photographs works look at New Zealand Samoans who play professional rugby in Europe. They include images taken in their Auckland homes as well as on the field in Montpellier, France and in Parma, Italy.

The photographs of the lounges of their family homes provide an insight into the lives of these elite sportsmen, lives that encompass performance expectations, distant memories of family and reflect her engagement with communal and personal rituals, family intimacies and the subtle way traditions mutate.

Déjeuner is a layered, commentary on transpositions of a “third culture” that investigates new global labour and economic exchange systems, enmeshed with the legacy of generations of displacement and migration shifting connection to the conception of “home.” Such migratory issues have been a key party of New Zealand’s social and cultural; background but the recent trend for a new wave of Pacific and New Zealand born people shifting to other locations around the world indicates a reshaping of our connection with the wider world.

Lisa Reihana’s collection of large format photographs represent Maori ancestral figures and combine history, mythology and artistic invention.

She is doing what Te Kooti and other artists did in the 19th entury in welding the mythological creations, the ancestors and the living together in photographs which owe as much to Weta Workshop as traditional iconography.

The works also use elements of western religious and mythological iconography and style to create images that cross the boundaries of gender, cultural fashion and history.

John Reynolds' Cloud was one of the major works in the 2006 Sydney Biennale and has since been bought by Te Papa.

It consists of over 7000 small canvases that use phrases and words from Harry Orsman’s The Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English.

The work spreads through several rooms creating clouds of words and phrases.

The installation is both a literary and aesthetic encounter. While the work can be read it is not just the reeling off of the words that make it an interesting encounter. It is also recognizing words that have gone out of use or which we find no connection with.

This shows how language is in a state of continual movement, a changing means of communication. It is also a recognition of the way we use language to name things.

Peter Robinson’s Ack is a vast set of polystyrene forms which is both a single organic sculptural form as well as being an intriguing model for the known and unknown.

The work harks back to primitive times recalling crudely produced bulbous deities and reliquaries like the Venus of Willendorf, an object designed for a specific spiritual purpose.

It also references Michelangelo’s late sculptures of figures partially cut from lumps of marble.

Michelangelo and other sculptors have declared that they merely expose the figures trapped within the stone.

Similarly in Ack Robinson has several rectangular blocks of polystyrene waiting to have their inner forms exposed.

It also has connections to science fiction with the form bursting through the wall reminiscent of the birth of the monster in the film Alien.

Robinson’s sprawling sculptures often appear to be models or elaborate flow diagrams of ideas and events, attempts to amp the universe, biological structures, social and political organization and even the workings of the human mind.