Law firm and real esate agency support new art school graduates

Glaister Ennor Graduate Art Award
Sanderson Gallery, Newmarket
Until July 24

This week I judged the annual Glaister Ennor Graduate Art Award which consists of The Glaister Ennor Emerging Artist award and the Barfooot and Thompson second prize award both of which support and encourage young artists in their final year at art school.

As always, it is a useful and valuable exhibition to see what’s happening at the art schools. Exhibitions like this encapsulate the way that the making of art and interactions with society is perceived by a new generation looking at things in new ways.

These new artists are indicators of the future directions of art making, building on past art practices to create new forms of communication.

Over the years these awards like many others have changed in some ways. There tend to be fewer paintings as artists have moved to digital formats but painting still endures and shows in this exhibition, with work ranging from  realist to abstract. There is Hiria Anderson’s Living Within the Boundaries ($4500), a group of nine works which seem to provide an intimate picture of a community while Nicholas Pounds Autumn Deluge ($2000) translates a response to the NZ Wars memorial on Symonds St with an expressionist attack of paint. There is a painterly drama with the work of Christine Tizard’s Furthest Ocean ($4200) as well as Vivienne Jung’s untitled work ($900) and Theresa Waugh’s untitled works ($920).

The video/digital work explores a range of subjects from the intimacy of Jasmine Te Hira’s The Beauty of Invisible Grief ($1950), the documentation of Bobby Luke’s Looking After Them ($250), the observations of physical movement by Ngaumutane Jones ($1500) and the quirky “ ($2000) of Mary Macgregor Reid.

The photography presents both the political and social with Jamie Stockman-Young’s Spectres of Violence ($2250) which builds on the work of photographers such as Fiona Clarke while the simple image of Karen Sewell’s The Stand In ($2000) continues the tradition of photographers like  Fiona Pardington and Peter Peryer of using simple images to imply complex narratives.

While many of the works are pushing the boundaries of art practice, there are also some more concerned about preserving culture and heritage. There are examples such as Hiria Anderson's group of paintings along with Jasmine Te Hira’s melting hei tiki made of ice and Bobby Luke’s meditation on preserving the past, both literally and figuratively.

One recurrent aspect was the references and homages to the art and artists of the past.

There is Wilhelom De Kooning in the work of Nicholas Pound, Frank Stella in Christine Tizard and a touch of Durer in Mary MacGregor-Reid's as well as Julia Holderness’s reimagining of the Christchurch art group. And there is the very fine small works by Katrina Beekhuis ($2000) with her appropriation of the early 20th century artists Laszlo Mohaly-Nagy and Paul Klee.

The Barfoot & Thompson award of $3000 went to Rose Meyer (Whitecliffe College of Art and Design) for her work “To Osborne Lane. 2 Kent Street” ($1210), which was a cardboard model of the Sanderson Gallery but, when I first saw it, I assumed it was actually the packaging of an art work which had been posted to the gallery and been removed.

That artwork would have been the shape and size of the spaces of the box just like the work of the English artist Rachel Whiteread who makes sculptures often using large spaces such as libraries as the moulds for the work. There is also a nod to Dane Mitchells winning work at the Waikato Contemporary Art Award, an assemblage made from the rubbish left over from unpacking.

There are references to work of the artist Billy Apple who notably from the late 1970s manipulated dealer gallery and public gallery spaces.

Then there are the lines of ink on the white paper. These could have been the lines drawn by the artist or the traces following a person wandering around the gallery. They were actually formed by a pen randomly moving around the enclosed box.

She presents us with the small model which appeals to people, like the doll's house and  the architectural model of a house. Within this, the artist takes the idea of the gallery becoming the site of a future exhibition with walls on which she can put models of his yet to be realized art works.

So in many ways Like Billy Apple and a number of overseas artists, she is interested in the processes of dealing in the art market, becoming the ultimate omnipotent artist able to control the way in which their art is received and viewed.

The Glaister Ennor Award of $5000 went to Julia Holderness (AUT) for her work, The Group Show 1961. Her installation is a mixture of the inventive, clever, the whimsical and the questioning, examining our cultural heritage It is a work about the past but also very much about how art has moved in the past 50 years.

The work takes inspiration from the applied arts works included in the Group show of 1961 and created ceramic items both real and imagined versions from that original exhibition.

The work links New Zealand’s art history with international movements such as the Bauhaus with items like the stylish Marianne Brandt teapot which the artist has reproduced and also signposts the way that art appropriates, borrows and reworks ideas,

Like the work of Rose Meyer, her work looks at the way that galleries work and the business of art is transacted.

The catalogue for the installation does not list the names of the major artists in the exhibition – McCahon Wollaston Doris Lusk and Rita Angus. Rather, it focuses on the domestic ceramics and textile objects that were always listed at the rear of these catalogues,

The installation is also a mini exhibition in itself, with the artist creating hand-crafted objects.

The work is particularly relevant, coinciding with the recent publication of the book Bloomsbury South by Peter Simpson, which deals with aspects of art in Christchurch and The Group in creating the contemporary art scene in New Zealand

The Glaister Ennor Staff Choice Award ($500) was won by Christine Tizard from Unitec and her piece Farthest Oceans.

Tune into NBR Radio’s Sunday Business with Andrew Patterson on Sunday morning, for analysis and feature-length interviews.