Six Ilam Graduates: Mea Culpa

The exhibition title, Mea Culpa, has become a sort of middle-brow cliché masquerading as highbrow apology – a flashy and pretentious way of apologising, often insincerely. It originates from a prayer of confession, the Confiteor (“I confess”) in the Latin Mass of the Roman Catholic Church and dates to around AD 1100: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa, “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”. While the making of art is frequently an almost autonomous, organic compulsion for practitioners, an expelled part of the body like a secretion, is it a compulsion that artists occasionally feel they must apologise for?

Do contemporary painters feel obliged to apologise for being interested in unfashionable figuration? Are they apologising for teaming old with new and high with low? Perhaps there is some unconscious anxiety at work here, and perhaps it manifests itself in the need for ironic distance that Irish writer James Joyce pioneered in order to put as much philosophical space between author and narrator as possible, regardless of how many references to autobiography there might be. In art it sort of ghosts around in modernist abstraction, but in contemporary postmodern art ironic distance becomes the subject of art itself. Of course there are many different ways to go about creating and depicting that ironic distance and can be found in the work of these graduates from the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts in Christchurch.