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| Mike Crawford- New Zealand Glass Artist in the International Spotlight again |
| Published: 10/08/2010 |
Following on from his successful appearance at Munich's prestigious Talente exhibition, in August New
Zealand artist Mike Crawford was again invited to present his work to a German audience, this time for the selection jury of the 2010 BKV Prize. This award is designed to showcase the younger generation of international applied artists, and Crawford will be sending three works for consideration.
The BKV Prize is a new award and exhibition, established in 2006 by the Bavarian Crafts Council in Munich
to reward excellence in the applied arts and design internationally. Participants are selected by a panel
comprising senior artists, curators and experts, who over a two-stage selection process will decide on the recipient of the 2010 prize.
Mike Crawford has been working in the medium of cast glass since 2002, when he began working as a
technician for New Zealand's pioneering glass artist Ann Robinson. He has been pursuing an independent
studio practice since 2005, and in 2009 relocated his studio to Hawke's Bay. In March 2010 Crawford was
selected by Creative New Zealand to travel to Munich to attend the Talente exhibition. |
| Graduate Awards, M.I.T. - Congratulations to Aiming Li |
| Published: 24/11/2008 |
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Each year Masterworks Gallery acknowledges excellence in a graduate jeweller by presenting the Masterworks Gallery Award to a student who has just completed the Jewellery course at the Manukau Institute of Technology.
We are delighted to announce that this year's recipient of the Masterworks Gallery Prize for Excellence is Aiming Li. |
| The Minimalist and the Extrovert: Thoughts on Paul Maseyk's American Ceramics. By Garth Clark. |
| Published: 4/11/2008 |
The Minimalist and the Extrovert: Thoughts on Paul Maseyk's American Ceramics.
by Garth Clark.
Some who view Paul Maseyk's current exhibition at Masterworks Gallery may wonder what happened to 'Saint Paul', (as he was satirically named by one of his New Zealand colleagues and something we will return to later). Yes, there was sexual content in his work before his US residency at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, but it was a bit more restrained, softened by patterns and dots and made less aggressive by Maseyk's puckish humour. Machinery stood in for genitals and that lead to the sexuality being abstracted, although, in retrospect, power tools may seem like inadequate camouflage. Now sex has taken centre stage, Puck is hornier, more mature, more frontal, and the content is rougher.
When Maseyk was asked 'do you think you would have made this work if you were not in the US' his reply was, 'I don't think so. Yes, I was heading in this direction anyway, but the content of the work certainly took a "ruder" tone. I don't know if that just came out of me because it was pending, or because, isolated in Montana, I felt anonymous and so didn't give a toss about the consequences.'
Maseyk has clearly enjoyed the freedom of being away from home, hearth and the scrutiny of peers, and the opportunity to let go of any boundaries in his work. But the content is not designed to shock, which is its saving grace. It appears more designed to release, to free the artist's vocabulary.
Nonetheless, A Day in the Life of P. Bateman will provoke. Patrick Bateman is one of the most frightening and reviled characters to emerge in late 20th century literature. He is the yuppie protagonist in Brett Easton Ellis's controversial 1990 novel American Psycho. Obsessed with style and status Bateman found balance in his artificial consumer-driven shallow world by committing acts of grotesque violence.
These are made all the more shocking by Bateman's flat first person descriptions that are, to quote the critic Nora Rawlinson, 'as impersonal as a car parts catalogue ... so that the reader has no way to understand this killer's motivations, making it even more frightening.'
'This piece is not going to cheer anyone up as it's fairly gruesome' Maseyk admits. 'The result is disturbing (even to myself), an object filled with my imagined drawings from the most graphically violent book I have yet read. So it has the nail gun he used, guns, a woman with her brains out, chopped off legs and a girl-on-girl sex scene complete with peeping tom peering in the window.'
For Maseyk the piece is in some sense an exorcism. The only way one can deal with traumatic information is to find an escape vehicle so that it can depart the mind or as Maseyk explains it - 'Sometimes these things just have to be made - for better or worse.'
Other psycho-sexual content in his ceramics (sometimes on pots but not always, a new totemic form has emerged) is different, even kindly. The Ship-Lady Featherston is an example. He gives a small-town character a totemic, androgynous memorial, at once heroic and eccentric. Lady Featherston is a trans-gender woman that Maseyk encountered in the small town of Featherston 'a real hole of a town that has the dubious distinction of being the second windiest place in the world'.
She stood about seven foot tall (of Samoan descent) with a long black coat and sensible brown shoes, as imposing as a ship in full sail, 'with her nose up in the air - quite graceful. She used to come into my shop [Maseyk had rented a studio and shop in an old supermarket building] and rant endlessly about all sorts of things until I could coax her out.'
Lady Featherston sits right in the front of the piece between her protruding breasts but is also repeated in the form itself with his/her penis (whether still intact or in memoriam). The drawings contain aspects, largely imagined, of her life including a vignette, strangely calm and meditative, in which she is surrounded by tubes that leak blood. A reference to sex change surgery, perhaps?
Also featured is an outline of a Brancusi sculpture and a scene that symbolically describes the struggle of gender crossover - a man trying to hold onto a woman when she is determined to leave him and escape out the window. As an historical footnote Maseyk has appropriated the general layout of the room from Miro's painting Harlequin's Carnival.
Lady Featherston's head is made of papier maché, and Maseyk, at the time of writing, is undecided as to whether it will stay or not, 'I rather like it, and I am eager to work in other materials, so this is a start'. Critics of Maseyk's habit of working mainly with dry surfaces will note another material shift, a complete section of glaze from the lower neck down to the checkerboard phallus. Glazing is hardly a breakthrough by itself but is a shift for Maseyk that he should use with restraint. When a piece is primarily black and white the glazing is not necessarily needed.
The form of 'There's no flies on me' also follows the shape of a woman with the base, breast and head. The base has a tunnel drawn onto it to represent particular women's anatomical parts. In this work Maseyk pulls together a collection of random drawings; a fire breathing fire extinguisher, Meg White (the drummer from the White Stripes), Nick Cave's Red Right Hand fondling the breast (the title of a 1994 song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds taken from John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost), a fly throwing up on a cross, and a fly emerging out from the artist's mouth (despite calling it There's no flies on me). The head was made his friend Christina West, a gifted American figurative sculptor but painted by Maseyk.
'St Paul, the Cowboy and King Dick', is, as the title suggests, a large rocket-like phallus albeit with a curiously hermaphroditic quality, the head morphing into a breast and nipple and the belly of the form flaring out into a hoop or 'poodle' skirt. Maseyk ventured out to see how well he could replicate some of the master painters' work, particularly those living in the late 1800's early 1900's in France; 'I love to read about their lives and how they seemed to have such a wild (drink soaked) existence. So I made copies of Picasso, Miro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lichtenstein, Mondrian amongst others. I was happy with the results.' Maseyk includes one of his own paintings Eye-Pod. ('I couldn't resist').
The middle band is a series of "Vegas Cards," a gift from a fellow Archie Bray Foundation resident that Maseyk renamed to include girls he has known. The piece is not linear, at least not to the viewer. The cast of characters (aside from the appropriated painters) are St Paul (Maseyk), the Cowboy - a friend named Erik who lives in New Zealand but is from Montana. King Dick refers to a ceramic colleague in New Zealand who in a show of teapots titled one, featuring drawings about Maseyk St Paul.
Not having seen the piece Maseyk wanted to respond so he drew King Dick's outline with his family coat of arms as the face. There is a tinge of green (envy) rising up his neck. On the other side of the piece is Maseyk's face with a vine strangling him, and at the end of the vine is an outline of the teapot in question.
Biography weaves in and out of all of Maseyk's work and rarely more didactically so than in Same Shit Different Country - Memories of Montana, recalling his time as a resident of the Archie Bray Foundation. It is crowded with beer labels and fast food logos around the base of the piece. Millers Crossing - hangout bar in Helena is, given many bacchanals, remembered fondly but perhaps not too well.
'The work has myself sitting in jail after being pulled over for drunk driving', Maseyk point outs. He didn't end up in jail but he was pulled over. 'Ashamedly I was drunk, but the cop let me off. I was convinced he either didn't understand my accent, or couldn't be bothered dealing with an annoying foreigner.' Iconography includes Willie Nelson (who Maseyk saw in concert in a small Montana town) and a trout he caught when visiting "the Cowboy" at the ranch where he was working.
On the top section one finds two panels with a black dot on them. 'Upon closer inspection one sees hard-core pornographic images scratched into the surface with the dot covering the worst (or best) of it. This technique I also used in the pot "Subtle" covering it with incised porn coyly sheltered by a multitude of black censoring dots. I love watching people's reactions walking up to it and discovering what actually is on the pot close up.'
This is the perfect piece on which to close this essay. It is to my mind the most provocative work of all. In this piece personal narrative disappears altogether. It is not as much a series of snapshots as in the other pieces. We move from noise into silence. Its pornographic edge has the anonymity of all promiscuous sex and in addition is barely visible from afar. No friends or specific painters reside in this work. It is not a diary even though it is partly about lust imagined. It verges on the edge of abstraction. The ceramic form is on a cusp somewhere between a totem and a pot, not yet fully one nor the other but clearly moving away from the latter.
The term, 'subtle', is painted on a honey-coloured pedestal. The irony is obvious. Also this word, given the sotto voce quality of the pot itself, is amusingly strident, yelling rather than whispering from the foot of the work.
It is also a work I have been waiting to see for some time. I have been trying to fathom the link between Maseyk's pots and his paintings. The latter are dominated by black forms on white grounds that are precise and geometric. These canvasses are not figurative in any way but tightly constrained and formally modernist. In other words the exact opposite of his ceramics with their free-range chicken approach to line and content.
I might have set this aside if the paintings were just part of his past but when Maseyk began to paint in Montana the same forms emerged. So clearly the black and white canvas with almost mechanistic shapes is a kind of Rosetta Stone in understanding his full aesthetic language.
Subtle is the closest to a bridge that I have seen to the paintings. Its form is more assertive because the competition for the eye's attention from the surface is less assertive. The black dots jump out and are compelling, particularly when one discovers what they are shielding. And somewhere between the two lies a place in which the two impulses, one minimalist the other extroverted, and the two disciplines - painting and pottery - might meet down the road and become one. It's an intriguing proposition. |
| The Great American Ceramic Dream: Paul Maseyk |
| Published: 29/09/2008 |
| See the Spring 2008 issue of Art News for an article on ceramicist Paul Maseyk's recent residency at the Archie Bray Foundation, Montana, USA. |
| Subverting the Pot: Andy Kingston |
| Published: 29/09/2008 |
| See the Autumn 2008 issue of Art News for an article on ceramicist Andy Kingston. |
| Solid Foundations: Chronicle Glass |
| Published: 29/09/2008 |
| See the April/May 2008 issue of Home New Zealand for an article on Wanganui's Chronicle Glass studio. |
| China Boy: John Parker |
| Published: 29/09/2008 |
| See the February/March 2008 issue of Home New Zealand for an article on ceramicist John Parker's home. |
| Galia Amsel: Glass |
| Published: 29/09/2008 |
| See Urbis #37, 2007, for an article on glass artist Galia Amsel. |
| Containers of the imagination |
| Published: 2/05/2007 |
Vessels are containers. So are vases, cups, bowls, dishes, urns, beakers, jugs and goblets. All have specific functions and all are vessels. But somehow 'vessel' implies something extra, something special. What is it?
Maybe it symbolises something - perhaps our memories of earlier functions and uses give this particular word an aura of respect. 'Vessels' are associated with the actual storage of something precious especially in ceremonies and rituals where something is poured from them, or offered by them. There is something meditative about a vessel, perhaps. It sits, self-contained, waiting to receive its contents and then safely storing them for some purpose. Vessels can be held in the hands in special ways or placed somewhere significant or meaningful.
Vessels in literature and mythology from societies across time and around the globe have carried grain and gold, blood and wine, ashes and perfumes, spices and potions. They can celebrate the stuff of which they are made or be decorated with narratives and fantasies, legends and events, flora and fauna, people and places.
Vessels are also vehicles for transporting what they contain. Boats from galleons to coracles carry their precious cargoes across real and imagined seas and even skies; tubular vessels in plants and animals carry life-sustaining fluids. We are so concerned with the importance of what vessels contain that we have been known to abuse empty ones, saying they make the most noise.
For today's makers, vessels may well have specific practical functions for storing or pouring, protecting or presenting. But their vessels are just as likely to have symbolic and metaphoric associations as well. We look at the references contemporary makers make to form and decoration and recall the ceremonial or ritual functions these elements may have once fulfilled. Today's vessels may well not only hold our coffee, cous-cous or cabernet - but still be to do with protecting souls, storing honour, reflecting status, bestowing well-being or recording stories.
The makers in this exhibition have worked from their knowledge of the history of the clay and glass they are using and the forms that are historically linked to those materials. Moreover, they have considered what a vessel might be, and what it might mean, to us today - and perhaps tomorrow. In the works in this exhibition function is linked to fantasy, practicality with imagination, purpose with play. These vessels are contemporary expressions of very old traditions. They are containers of the imagination.
Grace Cochrane
Grace Cochrane is an independent curator and writer, New Zealand-born and Sydney-based. She was formerly senior curator at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and most recently curator of Smart works: design and the handmade. |
| Ross Mitchell Anyon |
| Published: 22/01/2007 |
| See the new issue of Object magazine # 51 to see a profile of ceramic artist Ross Mitchell Anyon |
| Please Visit |
| Published: 24/11/2006 |
The new International and National Decorative Arts Gallery at the Auckland Museum. This opened on November 23rd and features historic and contemporary work charting the developement of the applied and decorative arts both in New Zealand and Internationally.
visit the museums website for more details: www.aucklandmuseum.com |
| Congratulations to.... |
| Published: 30/10/2006 |
Lyndsay Patterson, glass artist, who has been announced as the 2006 recipient of Thomas Award in glass. The award is made in conjunction with the Dowse Museum in Lower Hutt.
Alan Preston, jeweller, in 2007 will be the inaugural Deane Award for Decorative Arts and Design recipient. This award is also givin in conjunction with the Dowse Art Museum.
Peter Lange is the premier award winner at this years Portage Ceramics awards, held annually at Lopdell House. Also recognised was Northland ceramic artist Mark Mitchell who recieved the Merit award at the Portage awards. |
| twenty years supporting New Zealand applied arts |
| Published: 3/08/2006 |
In April 2006 Auckland's Masterworks Gallery celebrate twenty years of involvement with craft and the applied arts. Masterworks was established in 1986 by Ann Porter and Sara Sadd as a small gallery in Parnell's Habitat Courtyard. Their involvement with studio ceramics at the time had highlighted the lack of support for craft media in the wider art community and from this the idea of a dedicated venue for innovative craft art was borne.
Since this time the gallery has undergone several shifts and changes to better provide a venue for exploring contemporary craft media. Initially the scope of exhibited work was very broad, encompassing ceramics, fibre art, some metal, wood and jade carving, hot glass and notably the first castings by now pre-eminent glass artist Ann Robinson. A shift to York Street, Parnell, in 1992 saw the gallery mount much larger exhibitions, a highlight of which was a shadow exhibition to the Treasures of the Underworld exhibition curated by James Mack for the World Expo in Seville (1992). A later move to Ponsonby Rd and subsequent expansion to a dedicated exhibition space at the Viaduct basin has seen the gallery increase its focus on contemporary ceramics, glass and jewellery with small amounts of other media. The gallery's involvement in public events, exhibitions and commissions, for example the diplomatic gifting at Auckland' s 1999 APEC leaders summit, has furthered international recognition of the talent and diversity of New Zealand craft art.
Over the years Masterworks has provided a benchmark for contemporary craft galleries in New Zealand, and has represented a large number of artists who are now acclaimed on national and international levels. Twenty years on in 2006, the gallery continues its commitment to New Zealand applied arts with the opening of a new purpose-built exhibition space providing a professional venue for the ongoing exploration of craft media. |
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