Student artwork on show
Part of year’s end is when students hit the stage, with exhibitions documenting their year’s work.
Late November is when the students of Palmerston North assert their presence in local galleries. The graduating students of Toioho ki a¯ piti, Bachelor of Ma¯ ori Visual Arts, Massey University, take up residence in the first large gallery space of Te Manawa with the show ‘‘Matatau 2017", running over the holidays. The BAVI students (UCOL’S Bachelor of Applied Visual Imaging) are set up in a smaller gallery and various smaller collections pop up in other venues – this year the weaving graduates from Te Wa¯ nanga o Aotearoa, are showcased at Taylor Jensen Fine Arts.
I have a mixed response to all this graduation fever. On the one hand it is a great reminder, a tap on the shoulder, of what is going on in the city, often under the radar. But then, it does take up so much space that often there is no room for anything else.
No matter. The work that always steals the show is the Ma¯ ori Visual Arts graduates in Te Manawa. The students are few in number (five in this year’s presentation) with a big allotted space and with emphasis on technology and new media. So they tend to the noisy and showy, more so with each progressive year group and this year is no exception.
Some of this can fit in well as a point of contrast, such a complete change from, for example, Euan Macleod’s expressive chunky paintings in the gallery at the end. But I find it immensely sad that the theme of ‘‘navigating genealogy’’ (as the exhibition brief describes) isn’t explored through some more traditional materials – in this I mean traditional to art, not just pertaining to Ma¯ ori. But what is displayed – a mixture of video, photography, installation and some prefabrication – is professionally constructed.
The centrepiece of the show and probably my favourite for its clear honest concept was a multimedia installation: Four standing peaks around rocks that suggested to me the prows of buried canoes arranged in the formation of a Southern Cross with small lights playing along the surface like stars and a soundtrack of waves breaking on a beach. It is a stylised romantic tribute to navigation, but moulded with materials that are very contemporary.
Light is an even more dominant aspect of one artwork of a Ma¯ ori kite structure, hovering above as it is hung high on the wall, with bright blue, solar-powered LED lights.
Photography makes up one student’s entry, with three portraits depicting colonial oppression. One image is not terribly subtle, with the protagonist donning a dog mask.
A moving pattern makes up a video display and to round up the lineup is a series of geometric shapes like a series of pyramids or odd crystals chosen for their supposed sacred and therapeutic properties, covered in Ma¯ ori patterning.
A trip to Taylor Jensen Fine Arts sees tradition set as the cornerstone in an exhibition of weaving by Te Wa¯ nanga o Aotearoa graduate weavers 2017. The juxtaposition of this with the Massey graduates couldn’t be more extreme. Both are things Ma¯ ori, but here fabricated steel and complicated lighting is replaced by flax with natural fibres and dyes.
The show tends to be collections of smaller items (I had hoped to see large cloaks that are such beautiful items) and most of one wall is used for a collaborative grouping – a set of hexagonal pigeon holes that each student fills.
The show is titled ‘‘Te Ira Tangata’’ and is the third year that the arts degree in weaving has been offered in Palmerston North. It closes today.
‘‘Matatau 2017’’ runs until February 18, 2018.