Every few years, Wellington’s City Gallery stages “Prospect” in an attempt to take the pulse of contemporary New Zealand art. For the survey’s fourth incarnation, curator Kate Montgomery made a small but significant change was made to the show’s subtitle, from “New Art New Zealand” to “New Zealand Art Now.” The tweak implied a more urgent engagement with the present. Montgomery had also learned from earlier versions, which were often noisy, overcrowded affairs. By contrast, her selection was extremely focused: sixteen artists, all but three born between 1974 and 1985, thus neatly qualifying as “prospects.” Montgomery’s choices were also backed up by credentials; most have had an institutional show or residency, are in public collections, or have international representation. So much promise, then, for so little reward: While it was aesthetically coherent and at times quite beautiful, “Prospect” produced a cumulative sleepiness, and a profound silence about, well, nearly everything.

Taken in isolation, there were great individual moments. Ruth Buchanan’s three works were excellent, including Older Lovers etc., 2007, a video that reclaims the legacy of painter Flora Scales and plays with the clunky way New Zealand artists learned art history before the digital era. Presented in City Gallery’s auditorium, it felt like an amateur art-society lecture, with faded slides of New Zealand paintings thunking into place, accompanied by an enigmatic text that appeared on screen beneath the images. Sriwhana Spong’s video Whether standing or sitting or lying or in some other position in the dark, 2011, was also a meditative highlight: Continuing her recent exploration of dance, she presented consecutive views of a dancer moving through remembered fragments of a former performance, sound-tracked by the scrape and pock of her ballet shoes. A section of Dane Mitchell’s important “Radiant Matter” series, 2010–11, a succession of installations exploring the neurological, cultural, and sculptural implications of smell, was also presented, to elegant effect. And Kate Newby’s Just enough to feel stronger and a little bit fond, 2011—which called on gallery assistants to produce from their pockets silver and bronze casts of objects such as tinfoil balls, soda-can ring-pulls, and stones on request—was generous enough to raise a smile.

But this charm was the show’s problem. At best, the works offered viewers a knowing chuckle; at worst, a smug grin. The collective effect confirmed the current dominance of a particular—and particularly strange—New Zealand aesthetic, a kind of lo-fi, apolitical cool that often seems finicky and far too concerned with its own looks to step outside its comfort zone. Its potential for fussy self-regard was reinforced by the lack of a contextualizing voice: There were no wall labels, and the throwaway catalogue made no attempt to create links or frictions between works. As a result, everything was allowed to drift on its own current. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect a bit of fight from emergent artists—a feeling that their work might have something to say beyond art school or gallery. But this “Prospect” made New Zealand’s young talents seem aloof and uninterested in reaching out to the rest of the world, which is weird, given that several artists in the show have solid footholds in the international scene. Underpinning the exhibition was an alarming if unintentional thesis that perhaps we don’t want to deal with sticky questions at all; that when confronted with the grubby realities of globalization, we’d rather park up on our safe islands, make pretty things, and pat each other on the back instead.

—Anthony Byrt