Features

It’s OUSA Art Week, and art works are dotted around the campus. Among the more impressive are Emilie Truscott’s golden bones, Levi Hawken’s graffiti art and Spencer Hall’s collaborative robot. We introduce you to these artists; their backgrounds, their ideas, and most of all their artworks.

Emilie Truscott
Emilie Truscott graduated from Otago University in 2008 with a BA in Psychology and in early 2011 with a Diploma in Applied Social Services: Counselling from Otago Polytechnic. Having studied social construction and inspired by a sustainable practice paper at polytech, Truscott wanted to consider “social norms and the social construction of attractiveness“ in her work, fascinated as she was with other human beings and their beliefs and practices. Designer Bones is a work she created for OUSA Art week; a pile of gold, glittery bones half submerged in earth and placed in the busy locale of Otago University.
 
The work is a visual commentary on consumerism and the way in which we manipulate our bodies to communicate beauty and status to others. Truscott questions the extents to which we will go to achieve these ends. How much money we will spend and what new ways will we find to morph our bodies to fit society’s constructs? And will we as both a society and as individuals ever start to question representations of the body in popular culture?
 
Designer Bones alludes to a future in which we go so far in these machinations as to engineer our bones to direct specifications, genetically, surgically or otherwise. So even when we die we will leave a legacy of appearances behind us. Even in death, we will be beautiful for others.

- Kari Schmidt  
 
Levi Hawken
 
Levi Hawken, Skateboarder, Artist
 
Levi Hawken, an Auckland-born graffiti artist now based in Dunedin, has just had his first solo exhibition featuring his first foray into commercial art. Entitled “Willful Damage” it showcased at None Gallery early August this year.
 
Self-described as Wild style graffiti it represents simplicity creativity, freedom and life, this has not been Hawken’s first endeavour into the public arena. He painted 50 metres of the Leith river tunnel and has devoted many years to street graffiti, which he dedicated to his late grandfather. His style has developed with a change of medium from traditional spray paint to paint brushes. His main influences are skateboarding, German expressionists and other graffiti artists; he was self-taught in art and design.
 
He believes graffiti is a form of human expression, and should be encouraged in a way that it can be factored into society to foster artistic talents, rather than as the bombardment of obtrusive mass media advertisting.
 
Throughout his career he has dabbled in clothing design, merchandising and even beverage making, but most prominently skateboarding, which he has been doing for twenty-eight years. He is famed for hill bombing and has featured in several skateboard films.
 
Hawken’s latest work can be seen at Toast Bar, and his painting will be featured at OUSA Art Week 2011 at the St David’s Building and the ITS buildings on the University of Otago Campus.
- Shristi Vinayagan
 
Spencer Hall
It is quite likely that a large proportion of Dunedin residents have, at some point in the last few years, encountered the work of Spencer Hall. That's a somewhat weighty claim, but Hall seems to be mixed up in a surprisingly wide range of creative endeavours and events. He is the type of artist who can only be described as dedicated.
Hall’s name appears virtually all over the local art scene, attached to everything from animation and film-making to work on the radio. Most notably, Hall is heavily involved with the Dunedin Comic Collective. The publishing group, which Hall reportedly resurrected from the dead last year, promotes the work of New Zealand comic artists and independent musicians. Hall is the editor of the Collective's comic revue, DUD, and his artwork, naturally, features in its pages. He is also in charge of the “Comics” section in Critic.
Study, too, is somehow slotted in, and Hall is currently undertaking his final year at the Dunedin School of Art. He is working towards a Bachelor of Visual Arts, specialising in sculpture. For a taste of the work Hall has produced during his art school days, consider that one of his past projects includes a decapitated Barney the Dinosaur and a 'roadkill' version of Big Bird from Sesame Street. It is perhaps worth adding that both creatures are lying in pools of their own blood.
His contribution to this year's Art Week promises to have at least a little of the same grotesqueness. Called Exquisite Corpse, the work is inspired by an old surrealist game in which a strange figure is created from individually drawn body parts. It is a collaborative, multi-media piece. Hall also features elsewhere in Art Week, presenting a talk about the Dunedin Comic Collective at the Pecha Kucha night.
Those unacquainted with Spencer Hall should take note. His name is bound to reappear on the radar, somewhere thoroughly unexpected, in the not-so-distant future.