Speakers and Events
Show me your tattoo: Helen Mitchell
Over the past three years Massey University Lecturer and photographer Helen Mitchell has undertaken an extensive photographic research project documenting recent tattoo practice throughout New Zealand.
Having amassed a significant body of work on the contemporary tattoo, Helen is now offering a rare workshop for those tattooed individuals who are interested in sharing their tattoo stories while sitting for a unique photographic portrait.
When last offered in the 2007 BLOW Festival this workshop filled up very quickly, so register early to guarantee a place.
Photo credit: Helen Mitchell
Paul Gough (UK): An Exhibition Curated by Jeremy Diggle
Paul Gough is a painter, broadcaster and writer and has recently become the Pro Vice-Chancellor Research, Enterprise and Knowledge Exchange, at the University of the West of England, after 12 years as their Executive Dean of Creative Arts.
Paul was the Chair of the Art and Design Panel in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008, the United Kingdom’s equivalent to New Zealand’s Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF).
His recent research covers the aesthetics of conflict, landscapes of dereliction, and the iconography of commemoration. He has published widely in art history, cultural geographies and material culture and exhibits his paintings internationally. Paul’s large-scale history paintings, with a strong military theme, are in many private and public collections, including the Imperial War Museum, London and Canadian War Museum, Ottawa. He has shown widely in UK and abroad, and has had one-man shows in Canada, London, Manchester, Lancaster and Bristol.
He has a Masters in painting and a PhD in cultural history from the Royal College of Art. His most recent book, about ten painters from the Great War, is published this summer.
This exhibition, aptly located at the National War Memorial Carillon building in Wellington, is a must see for all those interested in exploring the visual cultures of war, memory, place and identity.
Place in Space: Emerging Artists Exhibition
A group of new artists present a collection of installations with an accent on process and performance.
The artworks vary in format, raising different questions of the audience as well as the space of exhibition. In this way The Print Factory site will play multiple roles as gallery, workshop, test space, and laboratory. Some artworks will respond directly to this environment, while others will create environments built within it.
This is a unique chance to see new works in various stages of completion by a diverse group of emerging artists. Featuring: Hannah Edmunds Andrew Ivory Shane McGrath Douglas Stichbury Mike Ting Johnathon Titheridge and others
SOFA Research Presentation
This is a rare opportunity to hear from distinguished members of the Massey University School of Fine Arts faculty as they present visual and textual material drawn from their past, present, and ongoing research projects.
Presenters include Professor Anne Noble (College of Creative Arts Research Director) and Senior Lecturers Maddie Leach, Simon Morris (2008 recipient of College Mid Career Research Award), Martin Patrick and Ann Shelton.
This SoFA research presentation will be introduced and moderated by LITMUS Research Initiative Director and Associate Professor Dr. David Cross. Questions and discussion will immediately follow the presentation. All welcome. Image: Simon Morris
Dance / Objectif: Showcasing Dance Photography
In optics an objective is the lens that focuses rays from an object and forms them into images on a focal plane. ‘Dance/objectif’ is a unique collaboration between final year Photography Students from Massey University and Dance Performance students from the New Zealand School of Dance.
‘Dance/objectif’ showcases outstanding examples of dance photography; capturing the passion and precision that embodies both disciplines and a must see for all.
This exhibition coincides with the annual New Zealand School of Dance Graduation Season – a selection of classical and contemporary dance works performed by NZSD students at Te Whaea Theatre. It also runs parallel with 'Exposure', the exhibition of graduand work from the College of Creative Arts at Massey.
Photo credit: David Seumanutafa
One Day Sculpture Book Launch
Following on from the successful nation-wide series, One Day Sculpture, that took place across 5 cities/regions over 2008/9, the book of the series edited by Claire Doherty and David Cross will have its New Zealand launch on November 18.
The book features prominent critics, curators and scholars who each explore new considerations of public sculpture, temporality, performance, and curating art in the public realm. Conceived as both a document and critical expansion of the series of twenty commissions, the book forms a new dimension to recent discussions on situation-specific art practices and commissioning art for the public realm.
Published by Kerber Verlag in Germany, contributors include Jon Bywater, Max Delany, Melanie Gilligan, Dorita Hannah, Amelia Jones, Patrick Laviolette, Daniel Palmer, Martin Patrick, Jane Rendell, Terry E. Smith, Lara Strongman, John Di Stefano, Ian Wedde and Mick Wilson.
The book launch will be followed by the premiere screening of John Di Stefano's new film, YOU ARE HERE (see performances).
You Are Here: A Film by John Di Stefano
Associate Professor John Di Stefano, artist/filmmaker, writer, and Director of Postgraduate Study in the School of Fine Arts, presents his most recent film, representing several years of research.
Structured around the filmmaker's autobiography, YOU ARE HERE examines the search for home within our era of transnational displacement. As the son of Italian immigrants, John Di Stefano examines shifting notions of home and belonging within the context of his ethnic origins, and also extends this into the realm of national and sexual identities and affiliations. The film chronicles the trajectory from his ancestral home in Italy, to his native Canada and beyond, to weave a compelling portrait shaped by memories of the past and the realities of the present.
Prof. Paul Gough (UK): Research through practice
Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Sally Morgan of Massey University’s College of Creative Arts is pleased to introduce Proessor Paul Gough, the United Kingdom’s leading authority on art and design research assessment.
His lecture is an opportunity for the art and design research community in New Zealand to hear a succinct and authoritative overview of research through practice in the context of research assessment.
Paul Gough is a painter, broadcaster and writer and has recently become the Pro Vice-Chancellor Research, Enterprise and Knowledge Exchange, at the University of the West of England, after 12 years as their Executive Dean of Creative Arts. Paul was the Chair of the Art and Design Panel in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008, the UK’s equivalent to New Zealand’s Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF).
His recent research covers the aesthetics of conflict, landscapes of dereliction, and the iconography of commemoration. Paul’s large-scale history paintings, with a strong military theme, are in many private and public collections, including the Imperial War Museum, London and Canadian War Museum, Ottawa. He has shown widely in UK and abroad, and has had one-man shows in Canada, London, Manchester, Lancaster and Bristol.
Peter Turner Memorial Lecture: Prof Anne Marsh - the photographic medium in a post-medium age
Rosalind Krauss has termed the current era the ‘the post-medium age’ in which “the aesthetic option of the medium has been declared outmoded, cashiered, washed-up, finished”. Krauss is concerned that ‘post-medium’ art is blurring the boundaries between disciplines too much. She argues that photography plays a major role in postmodernism because it “restructures the conditions of the other arts”,1 however, she laments the loss of the aesthetic medium.
How has this post-medium condition come to now threaten or destabilize the arts? What is it that makes art historians so concerned? Hal Foster is worried about how design and fashion have infiltrated the arts. Krauss sees trouble in the arena of the medium itself. At face value these comments appear reactive and conservative. Surely inter-disciplinary experiments are the backbone of research in our times.
Writing about Krauss and Foster’s recent work, George Baker argues that: “their breaking of a postmodernist and interdisciplinary taboo has let loose a series of much more conservative appeals to medium-specificity, a return to traditional artistic objects and practices and discourses that we must resist.”2
Drawing on research for her recent book LOOK! Contemporary Australian Photography, Anne Marsh will explore some of the issues that concern photography in the 21st Century. She will address critiques of the post medium condition and explore the influence of digital technologies and photo-installation through the works of several Australian art photographers who engage with the medium of photography in various ways.
2 George Baker, ‘Photography’s Expanded Field’, October, no.114, Fall 2005, p. 138.
Dr Anne Marsh is Professor of Theory and Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University. Her latest book LOOK! Contemporary Australian Photography will be launched late 2009. She is author of Pat Brassington: This is Not a Photograph (2006), The Darkroom: Photography and the Theatre of Desire (2003) and Body and Self: Performance Art in Australian, 1969-1992 (1993). Anne’s research has been generously funded by the Australia Council Research (2005, 2009, 2009), and the Australia Council (2008).