Primavera '08
Nick Dent previews Primavera, the MCA's annual show of young artists.
By Nick Dent
‘Primavera' is the name of a 1482 Botticelli painting featuring
Venus and a coterie of prancing Roman gods. It's also the name of the
MCA's annual September exhibition of emerging artists, funded by the
Jackson family.
Creatives featured in Primavera (Italian for
‘spring') frequently go on to join the pantheon of hot Oz artists:
former participants have included James Angus, Mikala Dwyer, Shaun
Gladwell and Lisa Roet.
This year's Primavera curator, Hannah Mathews, has selected 13
artists from five different states. Their works range from traditional
paintings to cross-disciplinary works involving performance,
architecture and music. Mark Hilton depicts violent contemporary events
in the style of Persian court tapestries and medieval frescoes. Paul
Knight's photographic works explore couples and intimacy. Performance
artist Danielle Freakley has produced a work in which she
communicates through quotations from films, books and famous speeches,
while duo Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont push the genre boundary
even further by presenting a musical theatre piece, Heart of Gold.
The undoubted talking point of the show will be the six-metre high
inflatable castle by Perth-based artist Marcus Canning entitled The
Pink Wienie. "‘Wienie' was a term coined by Walt Disney," explains
Canning. "It means an attractor, the carrot that gets people to go
towards things. The Sleeping Beauty castle that's in the first
Disneyland was a ‘wienie'."
An amalgamation of the forms of several Disney castles, Canning's
Pink Wienie may make the MCA the happiest art gallery on earth this
month. "It's made from hot pink silicon, which means it's an extremely
excessive object - innocent but kind of scary and sexy at the same
time. I think some people will be delighted by it and others might be
completely horrified."
Primavera 2008 opens Thu 18 Sep at the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rocks.