‘Hope’ Wins Major Award!

‘Hope’ Wins Major Award!

North Shore City Art Awards 2009 – Mairangi Arts Centre

In an enjoyably entertaining exhibition opening the award was presented by North Shore’s Mayor Andrew Williams to Frances Charles with her work Hope Frances received $3000 as the premier winner of this highly valued nationwide arts award and $1,000 as the winner of the Mairangi Arts Centre Photography Award.

Judges Warwick Brown, Jennifer Buckley and Jim Auckland commented that although it is now several decades since photography became accepted as a front-line method of creating contemporary art, there are still some who feel that it is somehow too easy, too replicable, unfair competition against meticulous realist painters and so on. While it is true that some photographers take seemingly random snapshot photographs and exhibit them in bulk on the principle that more is more, other artist photographers exploit the medium with care and intelligence. The overall winner of this year's North Shore City Art Award is such an artist.

"Hope" is a complex work. At first glance, with its cruciform composition and its make-up of separate areas of balanced colour, it seems more like an abstract painting on paper than a photograph. Closer inspection reveals that it is indeed a photograph, of the inside of an abandoned van. The balancing of the colours, especially the pale greens and the patches of blue, are so fine that one could be justified in suspecting that the image has been Photoshopped, but this is not apparent. The van seems to be halfway down a bank in a country area near bush. The urban/rural contrast, with conservationist overtones, makes an immediate impression. One's eye is drawn right into the picture, to the paddock glimpsed through the left-hand window, and one's thoughts move from the inside to the outside, trying to reconstruct the overall scene. The van appears to have been used for sleeping, or some other more sinister purpose. Is the van in the open at the edge of a field, or half-hidden in the undergrowth? Is it a mere shell, or still on its wheels? What was its history? Is the carburettor part of the van's engine? Was the suspended cloth on the right just there, or was it arranged by the artist? And what does the title of the work tell us?

The real success of this work is that its qualities as a pure visual image keep overwhelming the factual content, so that it becomes an object-lesson in the joys of looking – and a vindication of the assertion that photography can be art.

Other prize winners were: Belinda Griffiths with – Stand - The Gordon Harris Art & Graphics 2D Award and

Pam Dalton with Towards Wholeness – The Comworth Systems 3D Award

The Factory Frames Peoples Choice Award of $500 will be announced at the end of the exhibition on November 15.

All winners received a Membership Subscription package sponsored by the New Zealand Arts guild.