Although the arts section has been a relatively America's Cup-free zone, despite retailer pleas to feature cup "art", it's a fitting finale to note that Paris-based New Zealand sculptor Marian Fountain's cup medals (pictured) were presented to Alinghi and Team New Zealand on Monday.
America's Cup 2003 commissioned Fountain to design
the medals and supervise their manufacture, with silver medals going to the winners, and bronze to, gulp, Team NZ. The medals depict yachts travelling Downunder to meet the New Zealand cup holders on one side, with the races on the Hauraki Gulf on the other, Rangitoto on the horizon and lines representing the waves and those dratted isobars in the sky which caused so many problems.
Some of Fountain's work is on show at the Judith Anderson Gallery in Lorne St, and on Anzac Day, her cemetery installations will be exhibited in the northern French town of Le Quesnoy, liberated by New Zealand soldiers in World War 1.
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Conceptual artist Billy Apple has donated a work to Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide CEO Kevin Roberts for his fundraising efforts for the TYLA (Turn Your Life Around) trust. The trust, based in Avondale, works with police and school heads to help at-risk kids in the region, and Roberts has raised $150,000 for it over the past two years.
Apple's art work, entitled Turn Your Life Around, is the last in a trilogy from his Community Arts series. The first two works were donated to the Aids Foundation and Women's Refuge. Apple's design for TYLA will become the trust's logo.
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Recommended: Ocean's Edge, by Mal Bouzaid, Oedipus Rex Gallery. A great deal of New Zealand painting falls into bands of horizontal colour, possibly because of our common experience of looking out to sea. Mal Bouzaid has courageously broken from her realistic landscapes to express the experience of looking toward the horizon in abstract bands of thick colour. Until March 15.
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And: Money for Nothing, Artspace. The gallery's new director Tobias Berger's first exhibition looks at the relationship between art and economic values from the 1960s to today. The range of artists is international and multimedia, including a film by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas in which Lithuanian Savings Bank employees sing Abba's Money, Money, Money the day before privatisation; plus work by Andy Warhol, Billy Apple, Robert Watts, Eimi Tamur and many more, including Rirkrit Tiravanija's Ne Travaillez Jamais (Never Work, pictured). Opens tomorrow until April 12.
