THE 6th SCAPE CURATORIAL GROUP

The 6th SCAPE Curatorial Group: (left to right) William Field, Landscape Architect, Boffa Miskell; Julia Morison, Christchurch artist; Convenor, Blair French, Executive Director, Artspace Visual Art Centre in Sydney.

Photo: Duncan Shaw-Brown

For the 6th SCAPE Christchurch Biennial the Art & Industry Biennial Trust appointed a new Curatorial Group, a panel of experts who have set the artistic direction of the 6th biennial, selecting and working with artists to produce more substantial high impact public art projects. The group has three members, notably a new convenor in Blair French, the Executive Director of the Artspace Visual Art Centre in Sydney.  He is joined by Christchurch artist and Arts Foundation Laureate Artist, Julia Morison and Boffa Miskell Landscape Architect, William Field.

Blair French (Curatorial Group Convenor and Publication Editor) is Executive Director of Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney – Australia’s leading international residency-based contemporary arts centre. Working as both a curator and writer, over the past fifteen years Blair has played an influential role in defining the territory of Australian installation, performance, photo and video-based contemporary art in a range of exhibitions and publications, as well as working extensively with New Zealand art from the late-1960s with particular emphasis upon its relationship to global frameworks including conceptualism and colonialism. A selection of his essays were published in book form as Out of Time: Essays Between Photography and Art (2006), and a further book on Australian photo-based contemporary art – Twelve Australian Photo Artists – co-authored with Daniel Palmer was published in 2009. Blair contributed the major essay to the book accompanying Shaun Gladwell’s project for the Australian Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale and has edited a range of publications, including the 1999 book Photo Files: An Australian Photography Reader and a range of artist monograph publications. Blair has previously worked in art galleries and museums in NZ and the UK. In Sydney he has worked as Program Manager at the Australian Centre for Photography and as Associate Director at Performance Space; taught at both the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW and at the University of Western Sydney; and completed both an MA and a PhD at the University of Sydney. He was President of CAOs (Contemporary Arts Organisations Australia) 2006-2009.

Julia Morison was born 1952 in Pahiatua. In the years that Julia Morison has been working she has laid the foundation for a complex symbolic system upon which her work is based. Her vocabulary is inspired by esoteric and spiritual sources such as Hermeticism, the Kabbalah, alchemy and memory systems. Morison’s work has come to represent her own intellectual order through an interweaving of symbol, material and philosophy; re-interpreting or reviewing for a contemporary context. Morison’s work invites us to reflect on the ways structures manipulate the way we see things. Her interpretation of them offers a metaphor for other such systems and encourages us to consider them. Julia Morison has exhibited extensively within New Zealand and internationally and has been the recipient of many key awards, grants and residencies. Following on from a Diploma in Graphic Design (1972), an Honours degree in Fine Art from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts (1975) Morison received the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 1989 and the Moet & Chandon Fellowship in 1990 which enabled her to travel to France for a year’s residency subsequently becoming her home for the next ten years. Between 1999 and 2007 Morison was Senior Lecturer in Painting at the University of Canterbury, and was named New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate in 2005. She was accorded a significant survey exhibition mounted by and exhibited at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2006.

William Field has an academic background in landscape architecture and fine arts. His training and experience in landscape architecture and fine arts provides an excellent background for landscape design and assessment. He has 12 years experience based in Christchurch with Boffa Miskell Ltd Landscape Architecture, Urban Design, Ecology and Planning Consultancy, and is an Associate branch committee member of the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects. He is also a member of the Christchurch City Council’s Urban Design Panel. William’s particular interests and expertise relate to contemporary landscape design in the contexts of urban amenity and ecological design projects. His recent work has involved landscape design on Green Star related building projects such as the new Canterbury ICi3, preparing visual and urban design assessment for public artworks (2008 and 2006 SCAPE Christchurch Biennial of Art in Public Space), large-scale urban growth structure planning and landscape assessments (often related to Resource Management Act consenting projects) and assisting the Christchurch City Council on the Christchurch Urban Design Panel.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

ART AND THE CITY CENTRE: PROMPTING DISCUSSION ABOUT OUR URBAN ENVIRONMENT.

The inner city is both the site and subject of the 6th SCAPE Christchurch Biennial.

Christchurch, like many cities all over the world, is looking to new urban planning and development models to create a more livable, populated and environmentally sustainable inner city.

The 6th SCAPE presents a set of artist projects which probe, refocus and enhance both existing experiences and future projections of the inner city as a collective, civic space.

Often aligned with inner-city life, artists are at times unwittingly or unwillingly at the leading edge of urban regeneration processes which can often physically and economically displace them. SCAPE creates a platform for artists to make physical interventions in the ‘scape’ of the inner city, and to undertake actions that traverse its streets, paths, lanes and vacant spaces.
These interventions and actions create reverberation in places abandoned and derelict and others already subject to regeneration initiatives and commercial development.

SCAPE projects are located at strategic sites within the inner city and linked by the SCAPE 2010 Public Art Walkway, with the SCAPE Hub in Cathedral Square at its centre. Collectively these artists' projects will condense and intensify audience engagement with the works and the energy of the artworks’ and artists’ engagement with their locations.

Visitors will encounter sculptural structures and architectural modifications; utopian renditions of a future city and references to its history; artists working live within the city environment and artworks subject to climatic transformation through the six weeks of SCAPE; projects that invite movement through the city and projects that invite their public to pause, sit and look.