ILAM 2019
Featuring works drawn exclusively from 3rd, 4th, HONs and MFA studio-artists, ILAM 2019 was a curated snapshot of contemporary creative developments within the Ilam School of Fine Arts. The open studio exhibition was accompanied by a comprehensive publication providing both written and visual representation of all participating student-artists.
Designers Speak Up | Present Tense : Wāhine Toi Aotearoa
To record the current landscape of women in design and give visibility to the unsung diversity of Aotearoa design, Designers Speak (Up) made an open call early 2019 to all designers, artists and educators from the Directory of Women Designers to design a poster using the medium to explore and address any issue social, cultural, or political issue of their choice.
Present Tense : Wāhine Toi Aotearoa presents the posters in various forms — from printed to projected to published online — over the course of a project and exhibition hīkoi which launched in Kirikiriroa at RAMP Gallery. All posters are being collected into the Designers Speak (Up) poster archive.
Documentation of the project includes written contributions to offer contextual discussion during the project hīkoi around Aotearoa New Zealand.
This iteration of the exhibition includes silk-screened posters from ĀKAU Wāhine, Alessandra Banal, Anna Wilkinson, Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta, Ella Sutherland, Fiona Jack, Katie Kerr, Kyra Ta-Waka Clarke, Nell May, Pipi Press, Sarah Maxey and Sonya Lacey, as well as over 100 contributions to the #ff333 Poster Call from members of the Directory. Towards a Wider Understanding of Design by Michelle Wang is the fifth essay to accompany Present Tense : Wāhine Toi Aotearoa.
The project is an opportunity to give visibility and voice to women-identifying and non-binary designers to speak up using the poster medium. It is a space for myriad voices to be heard, supported and championed in the wholehearted, collective way that is the Designers Speak (Up) kaupapa.
Talk with Catherine Griffiths and Guests
Min-Young Her, Orissa Keane, Hannah Phillips, Alicia Skeaff | Ilam Fables
Ilam Fables was a collaborative exhibition centred around a set of original fables, illustrated through crafted objects and the treatment of the gallery itself as a tool and a material. As is characteristic of fables, Ilam Fables assesses the values of the actions and attitudes that surround us: from within the art school, and local art networks. At the same time, the show celebrates the whimsical and tactile potency of a trail of clues. These clues are offered to viewers in the form of ceramics, textiles, leadlights, sound and spatial interventions. Throughout Ilam Fables Keane, Phillips, Her and Skeaff foreground the show with generosity and the joy of making.
Min-Young Her, Orissa Keane, Hannah Phillips, and Alicia Skeaff are all fourth-year sculpture students studying towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Connie Dwyer, Christian Lamont, Jamie Teheuheu | Hinatore
Hīnātore was envisioned as an immersive gallery experience, grounded in the emotive resonance of light, and the physical/psychological experience of materiality. The exhibition is a study of light as both the subject, and the instrument of communicating emotion. Different approaches within the group show look to conjure spectrums of emotive experience, from awe and apprehension, to familiarity and reassurance. The evocative qualities of light transform the immediate space of the SoFA Gallery, by turn revealing and obscuring, reflecting and absorbing. In the darkened room, the illuminated pieces become points by which to navigate or orientate oneself. This line of enquiry stemmed from the practice of the late Bill Culbert, an Ilam School of Fine Arts alumnus renowned for his engagement with intrinsic qualities of light and reclaimed materials.
Connie Dwyer, Christian Lamont, and Jamie TeHeuheu are all fourth-year students studying towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Dwyer and TeHeuheu are majoring in Painting and Lamont in Film.
Sophie Ballantyne, Connie Dwyer, Min-Young Her | Why are you here today?
For many, physical areas of therapy can provide a safe space for one to freely express one's thoughts and at the same time, they can be clinical and alienating for people, becoming less of an open environment and one of isolation. These spaces exist as strange hubs between the personal and impersonal states, enabling visitors to leave unaffected or to pursue the option of treatment.
In therapy, these discomforts become even more apparent due to factors including physical surroundings, the stranger that is your therapist, and the uncertainty of whether this stranger is someone to commit to. Once unfamiliar offices become sacred safe spaces, an environment reflective of personal progression, openness and empathy. By recording these transitional spaces, Why Are You Here Today? explores the deliberate fashioning of these spaces and records the overlooked details missed in transition. Why Are You Here Today? looks to illuminate these private spaces and destigmatize the process of therapy through the works, providing the audience with an insight not otherwise available.
Sophie Ballantyne, Connie Dwyer and Min-Young Her are fourth year students all studying towards a Bachelor in Fine Arts. Ballantyne and Dwyer are majoring in Painting and Her in Sculpture.
Conor Clarke | Ground Water Mirror
Ground Water Mirror is a body of work conceived of in Berlin, and expanded on during a residency in Whanganui between 2017 and 2018. The exhibition features a series of photographs shot on medium format analogue film that contribute to a wider project involving video and sound.
Clarke is interested in attitudes towards nature that evolved during Romanticism and continue to dominate western ideology. She attempts to blur the false divide between nature and ourselves, depicting some of nature's most valued typologies like waterfalls and mountain peaks in often overlooked urban environments. Traditionally romanticised destinations become abstractions of the real world, where physical fact and inherited cultural associations combine to reflect that which we seek out, rather than that which is really there.
Conor Clarke grew up in rural South Auckland and has a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. She has exhibited regularly throughout Aotearoa, using the medium of photography to explore ecology, colonialism, land use and landscape representation. Based in Berlin since 2009, Clarke has recently relocated to Otautahi, Christchurch to begin as Lecturer in Photography at Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury.
Australia & New Zealand Photobook Award 2018
The photo book has enjoyed a meteoric rise in recent years. Combined with on-demand publishing it now offers photographers unprecedented and unmediated access to audiences for their work. From a bespoke and limited-edition artist book to a large print run showcasing the entire body of work of an artist, the photo book has shifted from background to foreground for the attention of art fairs, libraries and collectors.
The Australia & New Zealand Photobook Award celebrates excellence, originality, 'fitness for purpose' in photo book creation and is proudly sponsored by Momento Pro. Since 2011, $113,500 in prizes have been distributed to 50 winners and 130 finalists to help them publish and progress their career. Their work has also been showcased throughout the region and the world via a print catalogue and this travelling exhibition.
In conjunction with the Photobook Award books, we shall also be screening the Tangent Photography Collective documentary Pictures on paper. Photo books in New Zealand. This short documentary charts some of the key moments in the history of the photo book in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Interviews with early proponents of the form such as photographer/publisher Haru Sameshima and photographer David Cook give context. Harvey Benge talks about his long-term obsession with the photo book format, his own printed works and his extensive collection.
Tangent Photography Collective was founded in 2012 by lens-based artists Becky Nunes, Anita Tòtha and Parisa Taghizadeh as a platform for the insertion of photo-filmic practice into the local contemporary art discourse. Their intention was to advance the debate around visual culture in Aotearoa via rigorous discussion in a supportive environment.
Ciaran Begley | Dirty Entanglement
Dirty Entanglement is the product of a series of exhibitions investigating light and gravity in relation to the gallery experience. The work combines three large interactive plywood works with one stage light projecting an image of itself. These works utilise the properties of their materials beyond their expected physical capacities to stimulate investigation. These enquiries draw viewers into their own interactions with the work and in turn become part of this new appreciation of the reality we inhabit.
Ciaran Begley graduated from Ilam School of Fine Arts in 2000 and completed his MFA at Sydney University in 2016. Begley’s work investigates multiple material processes through the lens of an amateur physicist, origami designer and sculptor. Begley has exhibited in Wellington, Dunedin, London and Sydney, and has recently moved to Melbourne. Begley won the Howard Tribe Sculpture award in Sydney 2017.
Ella Sutherland | Carte Blanche
Carte Blanche continues Ella Sutherland’s interrogation of visual languages and the politics of visibility. Beginning development while on residency in Paris for the first twelve weeks of the gilets jaunes anti-government protests, Sutherland looks to the yellow vest itself as a highly effective signalling device to carry the language of a movement. Developed from an ongoing trajectory of questioning, Carte Blanche brings together voices of order and control in the urban environment, of power in typographic systems, and of dissent, revolution, ruptures and identity. The exhibition plays between the detritus and improvisations of this moment in France’s history, socio-political upheaval and revolution, and some of the most culturally prestigious parts of Parisian identity.
Ella Sutherland is a Sydney-based artist who holds an MFA from the University of Canterbury (2012). Her work investigates complex systems of reading and navigation within both the built environment and print media. In 2018, Sutherland was invited to participate in the 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea. Recent exhibitions include Margins & Satellites, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, 2018; Slow Seeing and Attention to Make, The Dowse, Wellington, 2016; Boring month start to finish, the whole month, North Projects, Christchurch, 2015. Sutherland was the 2018 Summer Resident at Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, and was selected for the 2018 Evolving Book program at the Banff Centre, Canada. In 2017, she was a finalist in the John Fries Award and the Redlands Art Prize, and in 2016 received a Merit Award at the National Contemporary Art Awards.
Tyne Gordon | Double Dribble
Double Dribble is an exhibition of new objects and paintings by 2018 Olivia Spencer Bower awardee Tyne Gordon. This body of work features water vessels, zones, fissures, and mounds. In Double Dribble, fictional spaces and forms are in a constant flux, dissolving and emerging, decomposing and regenerating.
Tyne Gordon graduated from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts with a BFA (Hons) degree in painting in 2015. Recent exhibitions include Precarious Nature, CoCA Toi Moroki, Christchurch; Water Park, Next Gallery, Christchurch; and Croon, 30 Upstairs, Wellington.
