Permissions, Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye, Dayle Palfreyman, August Ward

Artspace Aotearoa began this year with an exhibition looking at why and how an artist would leave the art world with Charlotte Posenenske's work in Priorities. We close the year thinking through entry points into this world with Permissions, the 2024 iteration of the Chartwell Trust New Commissions programme. From Poseneske’s staunch commitment to social good resulting in a change of career, we now look at the “emerging artist” as a territory in and of itself. The artists in Permissions are at the stages of locating their practices in relation to their worldviews while orienting themselves as "emerging” through various art world territories. This fringe position affords an agility that allows them to occupy and trespass artist-run, public, and commercial galleries, sometimes all at once. From the perspective of the artist, we consider what are the conditions required to foster a practice and what are the permissions needed to express it.

In Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye’s work saint louis saint louis (2024), the artist maps her matrilineal ancestry to Sénégal through France. The film follows a return journey between two archipelagos with the same name, one the former French colonial capital of Sénégal and the other in Paris. Narrated from the artist’s perspective, saint louis saint louis charts the emergence, reign, and disappearance of the signare – a term for women perceived to gain property, status and power through marriage to European men during French colonial West Africa from the late 1600s to the early 1900s. The work presented here builds on a project originally commissioned by RM Gallery in 2023, which was filmed across Tournon-sur-Rhône, Aix-en-Provence, and Dakar, and included Super 8 footage from family archives. This iteration tunnels into the project’s filmic enquiry, touching on African Francophone cinema and its contribution to the French New Wave.

Dayle Palfreyman presents two sets of sculptural works at either side of the gallery. Limbo consists of a lectern holding a pair of cast spinal discs. One is the atlas, the first cervical vertebrae in the neck; the other is the sacrum at the base of the spine. These palm-sized bronze sculptures are available for visitors to touch, welcoming the marks that hands leave on their form over time. Dayle’s practice choreographs bodily motion through institutional space with various wayfinders, often breaching standard gallery boundaries and redirecting the behaviour of the audience. At the other end of the gallery is Running Around the Sun, a brass sinkhole in a concrete slab. The artwork titles reference limbo and purgatory as mutable places and states of moral change. As an installation the works act as surrogate for the body itself, running the length of the gallery from neck to gut.

In a series of large-scale paintings, August Ward turns the emblems of fashion, beauty, and design into motifs for pictorial and compositional arrangement. August’s practice continues an interest in the visual markers of aspirational consumerism, and in Permissions this is extended to depictions of domestic spaces and their furnishings. Her paintings depict affluent suburban interiors and the vases and flowers that might occupy their open homes, teetering on becoming furnishings themselves with gravity and frivolity placed on equal footing. August’s paintings become objects about and products of consumption, complicating the desire for class ascension.

Anomalous to the inanimate and decorative in August’s work is the appearance of a house cat. Consider the territory of the domestic cat that lives over and in between the manicured demarcations of suburban planning. Living on top of the fences, topiary, and berms the cat navigates its own district like a city on top of a city. The feline's boundaries are sometimes determined by values other than our own, like the scent of hierarchy or an individual on heat. The emerging artist like the cat, has a wilful disregard for certain lays of the land. Ultimately, both trespass as a mode of relation perhaps aiming to simply expand existing domains.

After Posenenske left the art world, she dedicated herself to studying the workplace conditions of Sweden’s Volvo car plant. Volvo rejected the factory line model employed by Ford in favour of a “team assembly” way of working, one that considered the wellbeing of its employees. This field of research for Posenenske reiterated the values she explored in her artistic practice, which rejected market models of art production for reproducibility, access, and collaboration. We can only speculate on the full conditions for discontinuing her participation in the arts, but we should continue to investigate reasons for others to stay. If the field of the emerging artist is a territory, then so are the areas of “mid-career” and “established”. If this is the fixed career pathway, then what happens to the emerging artist’s ability to occupy and trespass modes of creative production and whose responsibility is it to push these territory boundaries?

Biographies

Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye is an artist and educator from Tāmaki Makaurau. Yana’s matrilineal ancestry harkens to Sénégal and France, and her patrilineal lineage is of Polish and Czech descent. Across film, site-responsive installation, and sculpture, Yana’s practice is a poetic inquiry into material and immaterial temporalities across human and more-than-human scales. Yana completed a Master of Spatial Design at AUT in 2022 and has had exhibitions at Blue Oyster Art Project Space and RM Gallery both in 2023.

Dayle Palfreyman recently moved to Tāmaki Makaurau from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and works across sculpture, installation and video. Dayle’s sculptural practice has primarily used metal, concrete, wood, and beeswax to create environments that explore the edges of bodily autonomy through the tensions between the industrial and natural materials employed. Dayle graduated from Massey University in 2020 with a BFA (Hons) and has had exhibitions at play_station in 2020, City Gallery Wellington in 2022, at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space in 2022, and 2023, and the Physics Room in 2024.

August Ward grew up in Tāmaki Makaurau and completed her MFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts in 2023. August’s painting practice is concerned with the visual markers of affluence and aspirational consumerism, in particular the emblems of fashion, beauty, interior design, and reality TV. Working in oil and graphite, these symbols become pictorial playthings for colour, composition, and surface. August has exhibited in artist-run spaces and galleries, including Melanie Roger Gallery, Paper Anniversary, Envy, Paludal and Ivan Anthony (upcoming).

OUR PROGRAMME 2024

This year we explore the question “do I need territory?” through our cornerstone exhibition programme, online reading and screening rooms, and other events. History shows us that the expressive commitment to forming an otherwise is unflinching, it also shows us a dogged insistence on wielding power at the cost of the other. The impulse to compartmentalise the many entangled zones it takes to run a life has been an efficient tool to entrench hierarchy. Boundaries, borders, and cuts are concepts enacted in order to extract a quantifiable value by separating or to withhold resources from the other. However, scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore encourages us to consider that these same sites are also where relationships begin, where transformation becomes possible. What would it take to feel not only part of a community but also full as an individual, a boundless participant? What world could be shaped when we go towards difference? Link here to read the full text.