Dialogues in Video Art: Works from the Chartwell Collection and Elam Artists is an exhibition that highlights moving image works from the Chartwell Collection in conversation with works by current Elam students and recent graduates. The exhibition is presented in two parts: the first runs from 21 to 29 August, and the second from 18 to 26 September.

Drawing on the rich collection of moving image works from the past nearly twenty years from the Chartwell Collection, this exhibition highlights timely and interconnected themes of embodiment, duration, and the natural world. These seminal works by established Aotearoa New Zealand and Australian artists are brought into dialogue with recent work by a younger generation of leading current students and recent graduates of Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, whose video work explores the same themes.

Artists in the Chartwell Collection like Campbell Patterson investigate the interface of bodies through familial ties, while Gabriella and Silvana Mangano make the gesture central, lending it the solidity of the sculptural. This is echoed in Elam works, like that of Gummer, where the found gestures of clips culled from blogs and social media are woven together, or Dixon-Hall's staging of a tense yet intimate interaction between two male figures, or the perverse exaggerations of Liu's theatrical production. 

Other Chartwell artists, like Phil Dadson and Angelica Mesiti, explore what happens when time is stretched and the temporal nature of video is mined. Just as Elam artists Tozer and Xu allow us to meditate on a singular event. This kind of meditation can in turn be connected to the body, as Mesiti's Chartwell work makes clear, with labor as the primary vehicle of her consideration of the time taken to perform a task, just as Elam student Kanji takes us inside the workings of the body.

Montieth's Chartwell work also explores the experience of action in time, with sports as the subject, and the way the movement of the dirtbikes in her work make marks on and through land, brings up the final theme of the natural world, allowing us to meditate on its uses and abuses in our contemporary moment.

Something related happens in Spong's Chartwell work, where the static stone sculptures of London's Hyde Park are juxtaposed with the manicured landscape of the park, all accessed through the act of touch, which in turns centers the feeling body. While for Frater's Chartwell work entropy and decay unfold in time as we watch sugar cubes dissolve in a surreal ballet of water and light. Elam student Jobbins in turn meditates on her surroundings, using natural analogues for the simple pleasures of intimacy.

Comparing the diverse moving image work of both established artists in the Chartwell Collection and emerging artists studying and recently graduated from Elam allow us to see the many ways that these themes have been, and continue to be, generative for various generations of artists in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia.

Curator: Alex Bacon
Assistant Curator: Audrey Goggin