How can you select one work of art out of 250 different applications as the outstanding one? The truth is you can't.
Image: Rohan Weallens 'To the Moon and Back' Winner - 2003 Waikato Contemporary Art AwardHow can you select one work of art out of 250 different applications as the outstanding one? The truth is you can't.
Image: Rohan Weallens 'To the Moon and Back' Winner - 2003 Waikato Contemporary Art AwardSubmissions do not often tell everything: the reproductions are sometimes bad or inadequate, or the artists' statements do more harm than good.

So after the finalists are named how can you choose the one winner? It is a little bit easier as you can actually see the originals, compare them to each other, think about it for a few days, and then decide. All of the outstanding fifty-one finalists had the potential to win-1 admit some more than others- but until the last day, I had few favourites.

So why did I choose Rohan Weallans' To the Moon and Back in the end?

The reason is because that work was, ultimately, the most outstanding for me. It was the work which was the most appealing, associative and powerful. It was the work I would have bought for the Collection.

So why was it so appealing to me? Maybe some art historic hints: In 1866 Gustave Courbet painted the 'L'Origine du Monde' (The Origin of the World). The intimate part of a woman's body exposed. This painting, long hidden, is today one of the treasures in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. Then at the end of the 50s the Italian Lucio Fontana cut one incision into a monochrome canvas, making one of the most radical gestures in contemporary painting. Fontana continued doing these cuts and there is one of his works in every good museum in the world. Finally there is the I-Box from Robert Morris in 1962. One of the most important works of Minimal, Conceptual and Performance Art.
A simple wooden box, approximately 180cm high and 40cm wide, Robert Morris could fit
his body right into it. The 'I' was in the box.
The box was not a box anymore but a frame for the artist, a requisite for a performance and the artist's I-dentity.

But it may be that I was just attracted to this huge bright vagina. All these layers of paint made me think about time and sexuality. About certain radical changes in life and some things which will always stay the same. Art and Sex being some of the oldest pursuits given to humankind.

'To the Moon and Back' was brought to Hamilton on the roof-rack of a car. I hope if it ever
leaves it is in a crafted box made of wood
and polystyrene.
Tobias Berger
Director of ARTSPACE, Auckland