Artists of Hawaii 2006

HENRY R. LUCE GALLERY JUNE 23 - JULY 30

This will be the 56th annual presentation of one of the longest continuously-running, multimedia juried exhibitions in the United States. The event is intended to showcase the quality and diversity of island artists, as well as to provide encouragement and exposure for their work. One of the Academy’s most popular events, Artists of Hawai‘i never ceases to stimulate dialogue and debate regarding art making as well as artistic critique and evaluation. This year’s juror is Edmund Capon AM, OBE, Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. An interview with Edmund Capon follows.

1. What criteria do you use when judging a piece of art?
The best criteria is simply your initial response. Then you can start to be a little analytical—but not too much! I tend, therefore, to use subjective rather than objective criteria, even though the latter are of course the informants of your judgement. One, personal, idiosyncratic, criterion of my own—possibly more applicable to the considerations of acquisitions—is to look at a work now, today, and to project the mind to a decade hence, and try to imagine that same work. To sense if it will stand up to that ultimate and severest of critics: time.

2. Has your experience in either regional or national art centers influenced or shaped your interest in contemporary art?
Well, yes, one is inevitably informed, influenced even, by the immediate cultural environment. Judging an art award in Australia, as in Hawai‘i, one’s eye and mind become accustomed to a certain aesthetic and subject matter. For example, the landscape has really been the defining subject for Australian art, rather than the figure. In most recent times, however, a new factor has exercised some influence, and that is Asia. The general reorientation of Australian thinking and perception to embrace Asia—and the consequences of that in terms of economic, social, political and cultural involvement—is inevitably an increasing influence. One’s eye is much more attuned to contemporary
Asian art from Japan, Korea, China, East and Southeast Asia, and India than it ever was before. Naturally one’s aesthetic and judgement is not perhaps changed by such things, but influenced.

In his lecture The Greatest Portrait Prize in the World! Edmund Capon will bring his own perspective to Artists of Hawai‘i with a discussion of the Archibald Prize, one of Australia’s most famous visual arts competitions. This free lecture will be held in the Doris Duke Theatre Sunday June 4 at 2 p.m. Seating is limited and offered on a first-come, first-served basis. A reception will follow.