Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Macquarie Street Hobart
Saturday 4 August- Sunday 16 September 2007
The City of Hobart Art Prize 2007 exhibition was opened by the Lord Mayor of Hobart, Alderman Rob Valentine at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery on the evening of Friday 3 August 2007. At the opening the winners of the two $7,500 acquisitive prizes and the $5,000 acquisitive Moorilla Winter Collection - Tasmania Prize were announced.
A message from the Right Honourable, the Lord Mayor of Hobart, Alderman Rob Valentine
It is with great pleasure that I welcome people to the 2007 City of Hobart Art Prize exhibition. This year the City of Hobart Art Prize once again celebrates cultural excellence and innovation bringing together the categories of photography / digital media and glass from entries by artists, craftspeople and designers across Australia including all states and territories. The works created by the 54 practitioners featured in this exhibition cover a diverse range of art practice and I'm sure will appeal to a broad spectrum of viewers. From this exhibition, the works of the two winners of each category have been chosen for acquisition into the City of Hobart Art Prize Collection. The winner of the Moorilla Winter Collection Prize has also been acquired by Moorilla.
My congratulations to Ruth Maddison for her winning entry in photography / digital media, Kiah River and to Itzell Tazzyman for her winning entry in glass, Revealing our First Nature (Transcendence) II. Both winners receive a $7,500 prize provided by the Hobart City Council. My congratulations also to Lisa Garland the winner of the Moorilla Winter Collection - Tasmania Prize for her work Lyn with Flowers. This prize includes $5,000 generously provided by Moorilla and a selection of a premium Moorilla wine with her work showcased on the label. Congratulations finally to Cherine Fahd, Philip Wilson and Jessica Loughlin who each received a commendation from the judges for their entries.
To all of the artists and craftspeople who submitted entries this year, I sincerely thank you for participating in the City of Hobart Art Prize and making it the success that it is. Thanks must also go to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and our valuable sponsors. The Hobart City Council would also like to mention and acknowledge the ongoing support and commitment of its Arts Advisory Special Committee.
My thanks also to this year's judges Dr. Blair French, Executive Director, Artspace (Sydney) and Geoffrey Edwards, Director, Geelong Art Gallery who have travelled to Tasmania and committed themselves to this always difficult role with enthusiasm and great professionalism. I would particularly like to acknowledge our Tasmanian judge, Craig Judd, Senior Curator of Art, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery who has generously given his time, advice and energy in working with Council staff to make the City of Hobart Art Prize a truly professional event.
The Hobart City Council is very proud of its role in initiating and continuing to present this important national art prize as we believe it reflects our City's identity as a place where contemporary visual arts, craft and design are supported and celebrated.
Prizes Winners
Photography / Digital Media
Ruth Maddison
Kiah river 28.1.2006 Type C print
"I came to photography untrained. I picked up a camera at 30 and discovered a way to pursue my unerring interest in an individual's life. Photography has become my passion and my profession, I photograph generations of my family, the spaces we live in, the objects we surround ourselves with, many aspects of my community."
Glass
Itzell Tazzyman
Revealing our First Nature (Transcendence) II 2007 Production Chair made of wood, metal, glass and air
"Every material has a story. Glass is an ancient chameleon, carrying forth its story from the beginnings to the present, contributing to human endeavours perhaps more than any other material. This is what interests me about glass and why I craft it. So what are the strands that make up this story? Glass is all around us. Our own story of creativity is intertwined. I'm interested in the points of intersections, where our own human story, our humanity, consciousness, mortality, perceptions and spirit, junction with glass. In turn my practice consists of crafted objects, sculptures and installations that are singular, they use the glass for its poetic expression."
The Moorilla Winter Collection - Tasmania Prize.
This acquisitive prize sponsored by Moorilla was established to honour the memory of Jason Winter, Moorilla's late wine maker.
Lisa Garland
Lyn with Flowers 2007 Silver gelatin print
"In most cases people are photographed within their own space, depicting an intimate narrative. Spaces that would normally only be seen by friends and family are exposed to an unfamiliar audience. At times, hopefully the viewer feels like a voyeur, granted unlimited access to a stranger's private realm. The subject reminding us that how we craft our dwellings is ultimately a subtle act of self expression."
For more information on Moorilla visit: www.moorilla.com.au.
Judge's Commendation
Photography / Digital Media
Cherine Fahd
Trafalgar Square, Opera 2006 Lambda print
"Through photography I am able to explore and capture intimate moments of human expression when an individual seems to have forgotten him or herself, where although they are in a public space they are physical and emotional in a way that is usually saved for more private moments. I am interested in how people encounter public spaces and how the space constitutes each person in and by their relationship to themselves, to others around them and to the scene it-self."
Philip Wilson
Suburban Home #3 2007 Lambda print
"This work represents an ongoing investigation into the built environment or urban landscape. These are generally public places, in-between places emptied of people, and therefore the overwhelming and sometimes distracting power of the individual. Influenced by the work of photographers such as the Beckers' and Gursky I am more concerned with the force of people as a collective, specifically humanity's continuing destruction and re-invention of the physical world."
Glass
Jessica Loughlin
Visible Distance 2007 Glass
"In Southern Australia the land feels old, the hills are worn and the colours are subtle greys and blue. It is a quiet land. At half light the air changes from clear to translucent grey. Detail is lost, matter ceases to exist and I am left facing a vast space. My mind experiences an exhilarating quiet. My works do not depict landscape but rather space. They do not present ideas or call on intellect, but rather they offer a space for the mind to experience quiet."
Exhibiting Artists
Photography / Digital Media
Donna Bailey, Lorraine Biggs, Ivan Buljan, Jane Burton, Peter Charuk, Nici Cumpston, Andrew Curtis,
Adam Cuthbert, Simon Cuthbert, Jennifer Dickens, Damian Dillon, Karen Donnelly, Cherine Fahd,
Paul Ferman, Lisa Garland, Petrina Hicks, Penelope Hunt, Susan Kneebone, Garth Knight, Geoffrey Lea,
Ruth Maddison, David Martin, Simon Obarzanek, Rafaela Pandolfini, Izabela Pluta, Sally Rees, Lucia Rossi,
Tim Rowston, Joanne Saad, Lyndal Walker, Philip Wilson and Anne Zahalka.
Glass
Ruth Allen, Peter Bowles, Trudi Brinckman, Matt Calvert, Richard Clements, Zara Collins, Rebecca Coote,
Hilary Crawford, Ede Horton, Gerry King, Miki Kubo, Andrew Lavery, Jessica Loughlin, Tom Moore,
Nick Mount, Ian Mowbray, Aseem Pereira, Keith Rowe, Itzell Tazzyman, Mark Thiele, Janice Vitkovsky and
Robert Wynne.
Judging panel
The members of the judging panel for the City of Hobart Art Prize 2007 were:
- Dr. Blair French, Executive Director, Artspace, (Sydney).
- Geoffrey Edwards, Director, Geelong Art Gallery.
- Craig Judd, Senior Curator of Art, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Judge's Statement
The judges were impressed with the diversity and skill of the entrants to the 2007 City of Hobart Art Prize.
Highly Commended
Cherine Fahd depicts a group of slightly dazed, stylishly dressed people who are dwarfed/framed by immense classical columns. The group looks out, trying to take make sense of the real world after being in the hot house environment of the National Gallery in London. The composition echoes some of the art, the group must have just experienced inside - Tiepolo, Goya and Manet.
Jessica Loughlin is perhaps better known for making long and shallow, stylised boat shaped forms in fused glass with minutely incised texts that allude to Australian desert landscapes and the diaries of early European explorers. Here, in this new work, she has created an architectonic rectangular form. The implicit flows and drifts of muted tone and colour, and the atmospheric translucencies of the glass body retain references to 1950's abstraction similar to the works of Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko, artists who also use the landscape as a motif and source of inspiration.
Phillip Wilson's work takes the viewer into the suburban wildernesses of North America. The bright, but frigid winter light delineates all forms and textures in this panorama of other people's back yards. A fat Labrador dog seems to be the only living thing amongst this fascinating index of human habitation.
Winners
Ruth Maddison's long career as a social documentary photographer takes an impressive turn with the adoption of colour. Based at Eden, on the far south coast of New South Wales, this pristine print reveals a disarmingly simple and familiar scene. It is summer. The image depicts a small child with "Spider Man" floaties and an adult in a body of water (maybe the river). The photographer's vantage point adds a slightly disturbing quality to this intimate and compelling scene of random joyous play.
Itzell Tazzyman has made a sculpture that both challenges and underlines assumptions about the inherentley enigmatic medium of glass. By employing simple material contrasts, she has created an intriguing and animated form that defies use value, decoration and domesticity in order to beckon viewers into a meditation of the surreal and to poetry. At the same time the two extraordinary gleaming orbs of clear glass may be taken to signify the elemental parison or partially inflated bubble of hot glass that, in turn, reveals the artist's skill and respect for the time honoured tradition of glass blowing.
Craig Judd - Senior Curator of Art, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
The People's Choice Prize
A non-acquisitive prize of $1,000 for the most popular work in the exhibition, as voted for by the people of Hobart. This year's prize was won by Rebecca Coote for her work Flourish.
Rebecca Coote
Flourish 2007 (detail)
Kiln formed glass, stainless steel and MDF.
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"My glass practice is a sculptural one. Conceptually my work is grounded in modernist architecture, predominately the critique and interpretation of the modernist glass facade. I have both a questioning of, and admiration for the glass facades of influential modernist architect Mies van de Rohe, who's concept of a skin and bone architecture revolutionised our modern cityscapes. My sculptural works consider the materials used to build these high-rise buildings, raising questions in regard to the stability and sense of security they represent."
View the 2007 City of Hobart Artprize Catalogue.