Three recent graduates from the Dunedin School of Art were invited to exhibit at the Auckland Art Festival as part of the White Night Remuera Exhibit, on Saturday 12th March 2016.
Daniel Bloxham’s Commodity, Slaughter, Keystone, Extinction, Decimation (2015) is a large scale series of charcoal and chalk works on stretched raw hemp and cotton canvas that engage with the position of the non-human animal in our anthropocentric society. Daniel’s work depicts brutalised animals in a realistic manner to enlighten the viewer to common practices that involve the suffering and commodification of other non-human species.
He has use the gallery’s safe, informative space as a way of making upsetting content normally hidden from day-to-day life visible.
Stephanie Cossen’s work Wolf Boy and Parade (2015) tackles similar issues using humour and melancholy.The quirky sculptural works in the project, made with hand-stitched materials, have the appearance of stuffed toys. This makes the work easily accessible to the viewer without seeming like propaganda.
Stephanie believes modern life has made us drift away from an intuitive animal/human connection. Wolf Boy and Parade depicts humans putting on animals’ skin and becoming the animal, in a return to our natural roots. Her project is intended to be a vehicle to begin a discussion about the animals’ need for visibility within society.
The third project is my own. Pie (2015) highlights the gravity of wasting 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 landfills. The works are tactile, playful, and interact with the audience.
My work is inspired by the oversized soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and other works associated with the 1960’s Pop Art movement, where the contradictions of the prosaic object expanded to monumental scale and the firm objects became soft sculptures. I used this idea to make a point about food waste through using humour to gently nudge the spectator into contemplating a serious issue.