A Monument to Now
The show’s title is an ironic attempt to capture something of the moment. The current place/time we live in. To make a record or at least leave a trace behind for the future. To make sure that we cherish and value the small moments as well as the huge. This show attempts to address the idea of recording now in a way that upholds hope yet throws a knowing shadow upon all of us. The complicit, the victim, the winner, the authority, the lost, are all contained on the same continuum.
The works titled, Untitled Portraits etc. are a comment on the overuse and overt abuse of images and narratives that perpetuate problematic ideas. The Huia,[i] still celebrated as beautiful and haunting, yet extinct because of human fashion tastes.[ii] The girl with a pearl earring, is forever romanticized by media and film, yet the girl is anonymous, and based on the artists intention, her identity, or even her name was unimportant.
Kelly Richman-Abdou writes that, Girl with a Pearl Earring does not depict a specific person. Instead, it shows an anonymous girl dressed in opulent clothing who, “like a vision emanating from the darkness,” art historians explain in the Johannes Vermeer catalogue, “belongs to no specific time or place.”[iii]
Portrait of William Hobson is evident in its arrogance and self-serving presentation, Colin McCahon’s religious study, mocked by academics, and New Zealand’s favourite painter Rita Angus herself takes on a darker skin tone, she was an amazing painter so let’s overlook the brownface. Included in this portrait series is also, some royalty and paintings that gave the artist huge success and fortune, after their deaths.
The point to these works is to understand how power and knowledge works. I’ve given you less, I taken the detail and recognisable elements away and left the viewer with mere suggestion of colour palette contained in the original. Via a simple digital manipulation I have achieved a silencing that has occurred for many indigenous people throughout time. The story is still there, I have still given you something to look at, a presence of something but it exits in an absence of everything else.
This is a complex idea that is not fully realised yet goes some way at trying to explain how tired some people must be of giving everything and being left with nothing. The idea of questioning an often used phrase, ‘enough is enough’, but with the ‘other’ asking how much of enough is enough? All your land, all your knowledge, all your resources, all your songs, all your treasures, that will be just enough.
I included in this show a series of works on paper. These are poems that talk about their moment of creation and about the moment of experience. They are presence making art works. Designed to draw the reader in to the current moment. Their performance, of reading the poem aloud, re-presences the work. Fresh daily.
I tried to explain to a friend why we feel pain for people halfway around the world or down the road or opposite us on the bus. I’ll I could think of was the work I made that was just two thoughts connected, the work itself is just laser cut acrylic joined with copper hoops that reads, WE ARE HELD TOGETHER BY INSEPARABLE TIES THAT ARE GOLDEN AND PAINFUL.
There is other work in the show and some is self-evident others are more subtle. I really want to mention two work in particular titled, And We Went Outside, 2020, and Every Sea, 2020. These works were made in response to our collective effort to do good for the country and for communities during Covid-19. We stayed away from each other, physical distanced for the sake of our old people and those who are vulnerable. The poem appearing under the paint is a message of my gratitude but also a message of ongoing encouragement to continue. To not let life go back to normal, normal wasn’t working, normal was killing us.
Lastly the work Every Sea is at first a pun. The letter C and the words SEA are phonetically the same in English and therein lies the humour when referring to the Pacific ocean which also contains 3 letter C’s that all make a different sound. This is also a reference to all the languages in the Pacific and this artists thinks that is something worth remembering, continuing and saving.
This is other work in this show that has obvious reference to memory and monuments or ‘memory markers’, a term I coined in my 2018 thesis. But it is my hope that this show will encourage the visitors to think of their own monuments to now. Their own markers of time that they may be able to return to or remember that will preserve for them the special moment that is now.
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huia
[ii] Huia were also hunted to obtain their long, striking tail feathers for locally fashionable hat decorations. The second major cause of extinction was the widespread deforestation of the lowlands of the North Island by European settlers to create pasture for agriculture. Most of these forests were ancient, ecologically complex primary forests, and Huia were not able to survive in regenerating secondary forests. The last confirmed sighting of a Huia was on 28 December 1907 in the Tararua Ranges. Further credible sightings near Wellington were reported until 1922, and the last reported sightings were in Te Urewera National Park in the early 1960s. These birds are now highly sought after in the taxidermy collecting world despite the quality of some of the mounts we have seen. An extinct bird is afterall an extinct bird, one in which specifically taxidermy played such an important role in its demise, see below.
Extinction of the huia is sadly related to an international fashion of wearing their tail feathers in hats. On a royal visit to New Zealand, the Prince of York who later became King George V of England, was presented with a huia tail feather by a Maori chief. Huia feathers are a traditional Maori symbol of authority. The Prince of York followed the old custom of wearing huia tail feathers in headress, by placing the feather in his hat. This set off a world fashion trend that was devastating for huia.
Tail feathers and stuffed birds were in such demand that the bird was hunted vigorously until it was no longer found. The notable ornithologist Walter Buller, who killed large numbers of huia himself for museum collections, reported that a Maori hunting party collected 646 huia in a month. While the Prince of York's visit obviously affected the plight of the huia, it is not known if it was the total cause of extinction, as the bird's habitat had become severely depleted by 1907. Unlucky for us King George outlived the Huia and it is shameful that museums (British included) contributed so keenly to their demise.
[iii] https://mymodernmet.com/vermeer-the-girl-with-the-pearl-earring/#:~:text=During%20this%20era%2C%20enlightened%20artists,the%20best%20of%20Dutch%20art.
