AUT Visual Arts success

AUT Visual Arts success

It has been a successful few months for the AUT University Department of Visual Arts, with two senior lecturers winning national art prizes.

Dieneke Jansen won the the National Contemporary Art Award in August and Monique Jansen won the inaugural Parkin Drawing Prize.
The art award

Dieneke’s work, Morrison drive, Hobsonville 23 November 2012 was chosen as the winner from 37 finalists and many entries.

She says she finished the work specifically for the awards, but the work itself belongs to larger body of unfinished and ongoing pieces.

It is constructed from putting together 20+ photographs, joining viewpoints that look across and up and down.

“This is so that the viewpoints that look down are at the bottom of the image, which lays on the floor, and the viewpoints that look up are at the very top of the image. The 425 x 100 cm image takes a sweep from a close view parallel to the ground to distant building and trees, all with a good clarity of focus. This kind of high detail in a print this large is difficult to achieve within a single exposure and certainly the shift of viewpoint does not occur within a single exposed image.”

Her inspiration came from her interest in how photography allows people the possibility to think about their lives.

“In a few sites of transition, including Hobsonville, I have been exploring ways that a lens and its media might enable us to consider the way we think about our conditions of living, specifically urban and suburban conditions. Place has its specific and contested histories and I am interested in how, in this case, the changes taking place in Hobsonville are imbued with particular social and political values.”

The awards have been running since 2000 and have had a high quality of entrants and judges since its inception. This year the awards were judged by Jon Bywater, an academic, curator and writer on art, music, and theory.

As the winner this year Dieneke received a cheque for $15,000 from the sponsor, Waikato Society of Arts.

The drawing prize

In July another AUT senior lecturer in visual arts, Monique Jansen, won the inaugural Parkin Drawing Prize.

Her work, AO Folded Moire Drawing, is part of a larger body of work that explores her fascination with moire patterns.

The describes the work as a dense, overlayed grid of repeated, short, pencil lines (6B and 2B), that “form part of my ongoing fascination with moire patterns: an interference pattern that is created by the offsetting of two grids”.

Though an inaugural competition, entering was an easy decision for Monique.

“I have been working with drawing as a major part of my practice for many years so this award seemed like a great chance to contribute to the discussion around contemporary drawing. Also I have a huge amount of professional respect for the members of the selection panel and the judge (Heather Galbraith), so I had an idea that the award would be taken seriously and the standard of finalists would be high.”

She won the $20,000 prize from 800 submissions nationwide and 115 finalists.

And the judges were incredibly impressed with the work, including Heather Galbraith, Associate Professor, Massey University.

"This work has visual punch, sucks you into a vortex of marks where you can get lost for some time. The intricacy and character of the individual marks hits you second, by which time you develop some concern for whether the artist suffers from RSI, but the overall effect of the work is cohesive. The technique does not dominate the work: the process – while integral – does not render the work clinical."

ends

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