Graduates invited to exhibitat 2016 Auckland Art Festival

Otago Polytechnic Dunedin School of Art graduates invited to exhibit at 2016 Auckland Art Festival

Three Otago Polytechnic Bachelor of Visual Art graduates from the Dunedin School of Art have been invited to exhibit their end of year SITE15 work as part of the White Night Remuera Exhibit during the Auckland Art Festival, on Saturday, 12 March.

The works by Daniel Bloxham, Stephanie Cossens and Susan Nunn will be on display in the main Remuera festival space, with 6-9,000 people expected to visit the venue on Saturday, 12 march.
White Night (Nuit Blanche) was conceived in Paris in 2002 to make art and culture accessible to large audiences within public spaces. Aotearoa’s version of White Night is a free cultural event with visual art, illuminations, theatre, film, design, performances on display, as well as visits behind the scenes to artists’ studios for six hours, non-stop, throughout Auckland.

Daniel Bloxham’s Commodity, Slaughter, Keystone, Extinction, Decimation (2015) is a large scale (1.4 x 1.6m) series of five charcoal and chalk works on stretched raw hemp and cotton canvas.

“My work depicts a small portion and variety of brutalised animals in a realistic manner that aims to enlighten the viewer to common practices that involve the suffering and commodification of other non-human species,” says Daniel Bloxham.

Stephanie Cossens work Wolf Boy and Parade (2015) uses humour and melancholy to present issues relevant to daily life regarding human/animal relations. The nature of the sculptural works, and the choice of hand stitched materials as a medium, gives the appearance of stuffed toys.

“The animal-human connection was once an intuitive one, but in contemporary times it seems that we have drifted away from such a connection. Wolf Boy and Parade is a proposition that we, as humans, are searching to regain such a connection, through putting on the animal’s skin and becoming the animal, in a return to our natural roots,” says Stephanie Cossens.

Susan Nunn and her project Growing to Waste (2015) critically questions the status quo surrounding the wastage of good food. Oversized soft sculptured fruits and vegetables are piled, squashed and compacted into a confined space to demonstrate the amount of avoidable food waste sent to landfill from an average New Zealand household.

“Once having seen the oversized soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and other works associated with the 1960’s Pop Art movement I realised this was an excellent way to make a point about food waste using humour to gently nudge the spectator into contemplating a serious issue,” says Susan Nunn.

ENDS

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