Enjoy Presents was a group show toured by the Enjoy gallery in Wellington. With work by Ciaran Begley, Ryan Chadfield, Stephen Clover, Matt Couper, Eugene Hansen, Mike Heynes, John Lake, Louise Tullet and Tao Wells it presented a range of contemporary emerging art practice from Wellington to a Christchurch audience.
Enjoy Presents:
2003 saw the first shows in a programe of exchange between the High Street Project, Blue Oyster Gallery and Enjoy. The shows came about largely from a desire to articulate and strengthen the increasingly frequent yet informal connections existing between these spaces. It felt like a pertinent time to create a situation where this contact became more common and to solidify our familial ties by acknowleding them in a more formal manner.
Enjoy Presents: was mostly a show about a community; the people who constitute, and thus form its identity, as well as the structure of its organisation. In this case it was the community that surrounds and makes up Enjoy. To reflect this, we endeavoured to present a diverse selection of artists that would present audiences elsewhere with a cross section of the type of work shown at Enjoy, and being made in Wellington right now. All the artists involved in the show have at some point exhibited in the space, either in a group situation or with the presentation of solo work. Coming from many different backgrounds and at varying points of development, the artists repesent a set of connections apparent within our community.
The premise was to articulate the sense of community that forms the backbone of initiatives such as Enjoy and the HSP. Being a project about translating a space and its community elsewhere, there seemed no better place to locate the curatorial centre than amongst the people that give Enjoy the identity it continues to propogate. And, as we learned through putting the show on and travelling to meet our family in the south, these initiatives exist because there is a need for them. The local artists, writers, curators and administrators who sustain these spaces gain experience and a sense of supportive community in return.
It was fulfilling to see the completion of an idea floated quite some time ago. Due to the changing nature of people and operations and the limited budgets of artist run initiatives, the focus tends to remain tightly on facilitating exhibitions within the galleries they maintain. The exchange shows achieved an extension of this and served as a emissary both of the initiatives and of artists from their locale elsewhere. Indeed Enjoy viewed this as a sort of advertisement for the organisation and for the artists selected to exhibit in Enjoy Presents:.
In February 2004 Enjoy Presents: will be shown at Enjoy, giving a sense of completion as the works are back home and presented for the community that generated them. Later in 2004 another chapter will be added as the show travels to Rm103 in Auckland. We hope that these exchanges become a regular occurrence between organisations as we seek to widen the sense of community to one that is not limited by geographical boundaries.
Louise Tulett & Charlotte Huddleston
