Published by the Communications
and Development Department
30 August 2002
An installation bringing together Maori architectural development
with narratives about landscapes, histories and people opens in the
University of Canterbury’s SoFA Gallery in the Christchurch
Arts Centre next Wednesday 4 September.
Whare is a site-specific exhibition in a tent-like structure situated
within the gallery. It celebrates the significance of early formative
experiences of the gallery site (as the former University of Canterbury
Library), its tent-like construction alluding to the contemporary
significance of tents as temporary marae, and land occupation, shelters.
Nineteenth century Maori architecture was heavily influenced by the
scale and technology of Gothic Revival churches, and it is significant
that Whare is sited within a building of this style.
In the exhibition, the walls of the tent are used by seven artists
as “canvases” on which to project their work. The artists,
all of Maori descent, are: Darryn George (Ngapuhi), Eugene Hansen
(Ngati Maniapoto, Tainui), Lonnie Hutchinson (Ngai Tahu, Ngati Hamo),
Ngahiraka Mason (Ngai Tuhoe), Maree Mills (Ngai Tahu, Ngati Tuwharetoa),
Nathan Pohio (Ngai Tahu), and Rachael Rakena (Ngai Tahu, Ngati Wheke,
Ngapuhi, Pakeha). George, Hansen and Mills are graduates of the University’s
School of Fine Arts and Hutchinson is a former Macmillan Brown Centre
for Pacific Studies artist-in-residence.
The artists were asked to create video works and each has supplied
four, two minute long, sets of moving images -- with accompanying
soundtrack -- that are projected on to the front and rear of each
side of the roof and the two walls of the house. Once the work of
all the artists has been shown the DVD's loop back to the beginning
of the sequence. Each artist has responded in their own distinctive
way to the brief, although whanau (family), friends and whenua (land)
are recurring themes.
Maree Mills' work Koro commemorates her grandfather's life and place
in her whanau, and features footage of his birthday party followed
by a heartfelt tribute, recorded on video, over his waka tuapapaku
(funeral casket). A lament connects the two scenes, as does an exert
from his favourite film genre: the colonial meets the indigenous --
Westerns and Tarzan movies.
The life of Rachael Rakena's mother is also remembered in Mihi Aroha
through the inclusion of Maori music on the soundtrack and sympathetic
email messages sent to the artist after her bereavement. The text
runs down the Whare like tears, and has been likened by the artist
to korero (speech) and the roimata (tears) tukutuku (lattice wall
panel) pattern used to decorate some whare. During tangi (Maori funerals)
the waka tupapaku is often placed in a tent beside the wharenui.
The Maori fascination with Westerns is a theme in Nathan Pohio's
Twilight Zone, a Moon Walk at Te Raune Bay. Scenes of a Maori rodeo
champion and a panoramic view of whanau dressed in Western costume
illustrate that 'indians' can indeed become cowboys under certain
circumstances. References to the influence of imported cultures can
be discerned in the artist's twilight moon walk along the foreshore
of Te Raune Bay, and the fluttering -- almost bucking -- bull and
rider flag, hoisted at a local rodeo.
Friends feature in Darryn George's It’s a Scream, a set-to-music
sequence of still portrait images photographed against the backdrop
of the artist's paintings. The subjects' expressive facial gestures
allude to the anxieties and fears that all people experience, but
rarely show, the behavioural theme continuing concepts explored in
George's canvas-based work. The pixelated quality of the canvases
is extended to the portraits, which renders them in a surveillance
camera-style aesthetic.
Red, a presentation by Lonnie Hutchinson, is about whenua, the colour
red being a natural earth pigment associated with, and sourced from,
Papatuanuku, the Earth Mother. Hutchinson describes her work as a
nostalgic piece that deals with the relationship between past and
present, and space and time.
In So this is where I come to think, Ngahiraka Mason has conceived
of the whare as a 'mobile' place where she goes to consider life.
This experience is simulated through night footage shot during a plane
trip from Christchurch to Auckland, and the accompanying soundtrack
is similarly observational as well as poetic.
The nature of whare is also a central concern in Eugene Hansen's
Rex's Cybernautic Dreamscape Release Candidate 10. A yawning dinosaur
and a robotic dinosaur provide the figurative elements on the walls,
while wider global concerns are literally depicted on the ceiling,
in keeping with the respective placement of mortal and universal conceptual
works on the meeting house walls and roof. One side of the house appears
grey and murky, while the other is bright and intense, the contrast
suggesting that the two could be related -- along a 'vector' as the
artist suggests -- rather than standing in binary opposition to one
another.
Whare: 4 September-14 October, SoFA Gallery, Christchurch Arts Centre.
Gallery hours: Monday-Saturday 11am-5pm, Sundays 12noon-4pm. A project
in Scape: Art and Industry Urban Arts Festival running in Christchurch
from 1 September to 30 November.
For more information contact:
Dr Deidre Brown
Senior Lecturer in Art History
School of Fine Arts
University of Canterbury
Ph 03 364 2987 extn 8164
Email deidre.brown@canterbury.ac.nz
