S2 Week 3 - 2010 Walters Prize

1. The Walters Prize is a prize awarded once every two years and is widely considered the pinnacle of achievement in visual arts in New Zealand. The prize includes a NZ$50,000 grant and an all expenses paid trip to New York City, to exhibit at the famed Saatchi & Saatchi world headquarters.

2. Dan Arps ('Explaining Things'), whose work mostly consisted of found objects. A merging of the art world and real world.

Fiona Connor ('Something Transparent'), an exhibition that portrays fragmentation of reality - duplication, confusion, etc.

Saskia Leek ('Yellow is the Putty of the World'), whose simplistic and abstract paintings offer a fresh, bright and unique palette which is very attractive to the eye.

Alex Monteith ('Passing Manoeuvre'), who created a two-channel film to explore the concept of movement and space, and their relationship, by using motorcycles.

3. The 2010 Walters Prize jury consists of Jon Bywater, Rhana Devenport, Leonhard Emmerling and Kate Montgomery.

4. Vicente Todolí is the judge for the 2010 Walters Prize. Todolí is a highly accomplished and respected figure in the art world. Hailing from Valencia in Spain, Todolí studied in Valencia before moving to the US on a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Yale. He has since held high positions at New York's Whitney Museum, Valencia's IVAM and Serralves Contemporary Art Museum (Portugal), as well as collaborating with numerous other well known galleries and museums.

Most recently, he was the manager of probably the most famous modern art gallery in the world - Tate Modern - in London.

5. I didn't feel the artists had very strong concepts behind their work, for the most part. Arp's works did invoke a feeling of walking through someones personal belongings, but I wasn't particularly moved by it at all, nor did I find much of the work very visually pleasing. Connor's work was interesting, but I feel the concept was slightly dull. The use of duplication in a 3d sense is definitely impressive, but the base concept is very simple and has been used many times over in a range of different mediums. Leek's works were simplistic, abstract and nice to look at, but there wasn't much going on at all behind the few layers of yellow paints. Monteith's work drew me in the most, as I was interested in the movement of the bikes through the traffic, and the unique 2 channel production of the film.

However, I walked away from the film out of sheer boredom after 10 minutes or so. I understand the concept of movement and space, and Auckland traffic mixed with motorbikes are a great example, but I think this concept could have been pushed much, much further. The use of extra cameras at angles that show the spacing and interaction between the bikes and their surroundings would have been interesting. Change in speeds and directions would have added intrigue to the film. Instead I walked away feeling like I had just been stuck in traffic myself. Maybe if the film was shorter and more to-the-point, it wouldn't have had such an effect.

Overall I didn't find any of the work particularly moving, but the most interesting concept combined with visual aesthetics and unique portrayal and production was Alex Monteith's 'Passing Manoeuvre'. This would be m nomination for the prize, though I was expecting so much more from all the artists involved, I think their are much more deserving artists out there and that these nominations were based more diversity than quality.