Boundaries blurred at campus galleries

By MALCOLM BURGESS


Life seemed to imitate art when Fiona Jack returned from Los Angeles to take part in Manoeuvre, the inaugural show at central Auckland's new St Paul St galleries in the AUT campus. In an unsettling echo of the AUT graduate's most famous work - her 1997 Nothing billboard campaign - she was greeted by a city dotted with eerily similar hoardings.

But these imitations lacked the original subversion that earned them international coverage in such alternative magazines as Utne Reader and Adbusters. Jack says she has been asked often about what turned out to be advertisements for a telecommunications giant's latest business pricing plan. "I don't suppose there's much I can do."

The coincidence is fitting for a show that draws together artists and designers whose common thread is a blurring of the boundaries between work, life, art, design and architecture.

Curators Nova Paul and Monique Redmond's vision brings together Jack and other AUT graduates - Melbourne-based conceptual sculptor Alicia Frankovich, eclectic graphic designer Kelvin Soh and collage artist Peter Madden - to mark the launch of their alma mater university's new Jasmax-designed, purpose-built edifice of art and design.

Two gallery spaces, a new media project area, a window gallery and an outdoor projection wall nestle at the bottom of six floors of undergraduate and postgraduate studios, workshops, offices and seminar rooms. The setting reinforces the curators' message of the importance of academic learning in the career of artistic practitioners.

"These artists have taken their training and done something with it," says Redmond, who is a sculptor.

"They are obsessed by their practice," confirms Paul, at other times a film-maker.

Jack, who is studying for her MFA at CalArts in Los Angeles, draws on activism, landscape painting, book design and performance in her works.

For Manoeuvre she has included a poetry book-like tome called Missing Peoples - A Supplement to Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, eleventh edition, which details the US dictionary's 83 missing nationalities, and wallpaper featuring 21 objects included in the same dictionary whose names derive from the missing countries.

Though Webster may have no room to describe Austrians, up pops Austrian pine; no Cubans, but hey presto - Cuban heel.

Clearly on display is her interest in politics, land and human rights issues. Living in the US, Jack feels implicated in one of the most overt political dramas on the world stage, that of Israel and Palestine.

Works that clearly refer to this issue include Olive trees for Jayous, in which she has drawn olive trees within a frame to represent how Palestinian olive farmers were locked out of their land over three weeks at harvest time.

In Palestine becoming Palestine Jack superimposes the changed demarcation of Palestinian areas - literally blurring the borders of a fiercely imagined state.

Combining a painterly sense of composition with a magpie's eye for collage, Auckland-based artist Peter Madden not only paints with found images, but uses unexpected canvases, too. In view-finders attached to the galleries' floor-to-ceiling windows, Madden's stereoscopic prints offer a nightmare alternative to the cityscape beyond.

Other works in the show include Deaths Head, in which he has painted on the back of a fly, collage sculpture Electric Chair, a painted snail's shell (Snail), and collages using images cut mostly from National Geographic.

Most notable of the works of Soh, partner of design agency the Wilderness, are his Plastic images of plastic objects, influenced by the faded, entombed laminates in the window above Payless Plastics on Auckland's K Rd.

"Manoeuvre was an opportunity to explore some ideas and processes of working that I might not normally be able to do," says Soh, a practising graphic designer.

He describes coming into a gallery context from the marketplace like the difference between working in a "fish market" and "a quiet room".

Conceptual sculptor Alicia Frankovich is particularly obsessed by global furniture chain Ikea - perhaps it's a Melbourne thing. Her works "ask questions about standards of living", she says, and relate to her past as a gymnast.

Playing with Ikea's habit of naming its furniture, Frankovich labels her objects with the monikers of eastern European gymnasts. Her works, all new for the show, were produced on site and, like Tracy Emin's bed, the detritus of their construction remain for all to see.

Within the industrial setting of Gallery 1, with its exposed ducts conjuring the vastness of a warehouse setting, is a trampoline, a hurdle, gymnast shoes, bags and a pavilion roof. Frankovich says it's about a softening of architecture - "a critique of these confining parameters".

With an MA from Goldsmiths in London and many years' experience running the Camden Arts Centre, overall gallery curator Heather Galbraith says she is glad to be working with St Paul St's "bold raw polished concrete" as a change from the "parquet floor" of previous jobs.

Upcoming plans for the galleries include a show curated by Auckland Art Gallery's Robert Leonard, a group show featuring works by Michael Smithers, Gavin Hipkins and Yvonne Todd, and a Dutch graphic design show.

Galbraith wants the new space to be a hub of debate on such questions as how you define art and design and to offer an "interesting meeting point" for the two.

Exhibition

* What: Manoeuvre, by Alicia Frankovich, Fiona Jack, Peter Madden, Kelvin Soh/The Wilderness

* Where and when: St Paul St Gallery, to Dec 11