Wednesday 24 May 2017
The 2017 Chartwell Collection show Shout Whisper Wail! opened on Saturday 20 May at Auckland Art Gallery with five new commissions included among 10 presentations.
The exhibition explores how artists generate work that might elicit an audience response or direct a particular kind of engagement.
A new documentary The Missing People has been made to complement and explore some of the themes of Shout Whisper Wail!. In this film the artists reflect on how they hope their work might operate in a public exhibition, and how it might make the audience think about the relationship between art and life.
Auckland Art Gallery’s Curator of Contemporary Art Natasha Conland says in the experience of an exhibition the expectations of artists and audiences are uniquely engaged in the same space.
‘With these two competing expectations, how then do visual artists direct, engage or even speak to audiences?’ she says.
Following her 2012 show from the Chartwell Collection, Made Active, Conland broadens the discussion of mark-making and performance to consider artist-led engagement. She aims to untangle the question of how and why an artist might make work that provokes a response or question for their viewer.
‘As the artists’ intentions or questions for their audiences may not be writ large in their work, I’ve asked “how then does visual communication operate? What are some of the ways audiences and artists have a relationship to art and ideas?”’
Across Shout Whisper Wail! there is a resounding case for the audience to think more deeply about popular culture, whether in terms of consumption or through artists, such as Andy Warhol, gender and other politics, cultural minorities or socio-economic conditions. The exhibition considers the role artists play in contributing to the field of communication of which we are all inevitably a part of.
New commissions include work by Janet Lilo, Stuart Ringholt, Jacqueline Fraser and a collaboration between Juliet Carpenter and Biljana Popovic. Existing works are by Luke Willis Thompson, Julian Dashper, Alicia Frankovich, Marco Fusinato and a collaboration between Samuel Holloway and et al.
The show celebrates the activities of the Chartwell Trust, which is the owner of the Chartwell Collection and a major supporter of artists from across Australasia. The Chartwell Collection is held on long-term loan by Auckland Art Gallery and its works are regularly seen throughout the Gallery’s collection exhibitions.
For 40 years, Chartwell Trust Founding Director, Rob Gardiner, has aimed to bring to the public an understanding of the ways artists see the world. In Shout Whisper Wail! Conland has included new commissions and artworks from the Chartwell Collection to honour the Trust’s collecting and significant support of the art community.
Entry to Shout Whisper Wail! is free and the exhibition is on at Auckland Art Gallery until Sunday 15 October 2017.
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