KEY ARTISTS:
Parekowhai, Reihana & Kihara
and time dependant: Cotton, Pule
KEY MEANINGS:
Reality
Identity
Narrative
Ideas about art, media, and culture
KEY CONTEXTS:
The digital environment
Challenging power & hierarchies
Environmental & cultural interactions
This context is more specific to the works of Reihana. For many of her major works, the use of digital medium has played a very important role in creating a sense of continuum and contemporary feeling in Maori art. She chose to work with digital multimedia while still embracing traditional cultural values, embodied by motifs such as marae and historical & mythological narratives. This can be seen as an attempt to 'update' Maori art using the contemporary language. She also creates a physical exhibition environment for her viewers to 'experience' such digital creations, mimicking the very reality of how we form a lot of our own experiences through digital means everyday in the contemporary society.
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The interest in post-colonialism is a significant influence for Parekowhai, Reihana and Kihara's art. Considering this post-colonial perspective, their art practices can be seen as a challenge to the cultural hierarchies that still exist in New Zealand.
As well as addressing the cultural imbalances caused by colonisation, Reihana's attention to 'black feminism' and Kihara's themes surrounding gender issues can also be discussed within the context of artists challenging power (dominating social expectations and persisting stereotypes) and hierarchies (social and cultural). |
The discussion of this context will work hand in hand with a lot of the ideas already mentioned under the contexts of 'the digital environment' and 'challenging power & hierarchies'.
Artists' own post-colonial perspectives and their use of art medium (digital installation, performance, public sculpture...) would inevitably inform the kind of interaction their viewers will bring to their work, extending to more personal understanding of environmental & cultural interactions that we have in New Zealand. For Parekowhai, the specific location of where his art is exhibited should also be considered (e.g. The Lighthouse), as the nature and location of the work would add to how art reflects such a context. |
Michael's narratives can be complex; he draws on an abundant range of both vernacular and collective vocabularies which he re-manufactures into the narrative structures and formal languages of his work. Although key themes of his practice could be described as deliberate takes on notions of introduced species and culture, any potentially overt political dimensions are downplayed. Ideas of camaraderie, tools of teaching and childhood learning, as well as quotes from the canon of modern art history and popular culture openly play out in many of Michael's stories. While his work is often described as emphasising the extraordinariness of the ordinary, each body of work has layers of potential for meaning and significance - they are open to any depth of interpretation and storytelling." On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, 2011
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NEW ZEALAND'S POST-MODERN DUCHAMP?Michael Parekowhai (b.1968)Educated at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, Michael Parekowhai gained his BFA in 1990 and a MFA in 2000. A Professor now at Auckland University, he teaches at Elam. He has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for almost three decades.
Michael Parekowhai is an Auckland-based sculptor, photographer and installation artist of Māori (Ngā Ariki Kaiputahi, Ngāti Whakarongo) and Pakeha descent, highly regarded for his daring culturally thematic explorations, Pop (but conceptualist) accessibility, impeccable industrial finish and robust physical presence. He is skilled at coming up with clever ideas presented in a form that engages with his audience visually (and emotionally) and which is ambitious in its studio production. The range of his interests—though usually community-oriented—startles with its unpredictability, extending from children's education, parlour games, music forms, introduced wildlife and cultural appropriation, to nuances and ambiguities of spoken language, recognisable art historical motifs and historical personages. When he links these assorted and often unrelated disciplines up, various spatial juxtapositions and ideational sandwiches are used with wit to bring vibrant resonances to his sculpture. A good example of Parekowhai's art is his weatherboard state house sculpture, The Lighthouse (2017), which is positioned on Queen's Wharf in downtown Auckland. State houses are loathed by some New Zealanders and aesthetically adored by others for their 'basic' form. As a state-sponsored variety of cheap housing, the state house has come to be seen by many New Zealanders as a symbol of the political and social debate surrounding Auckland's housing crises, which saw the rise of forced evictions to make way for multi-dwelling apartments. Parekowhai's provocative sculpture is a life-sized, two-storied dwelling with an outside staircase and balcony so that its upper and lower windows and porches can be peered into. It has no first floor but all the inner wall and ceiling surfaces are painted in glossy white. Inside is a giant stainless steel figure of Captain Cook sitting nervously on a table fixed to a tripod positioned in front of the fireplace. On different timers and strategically positioned around the walls—and straddling across windows on both levels—are hundreds of pieces of coloured neon tubing. As a constantly moving spidery network, these flashing glowing lines can be interpreted in several ways. Some seem to be parts of coastline from maps made around the Pacific. Others could refer to constellations in the southern night sky. This spectacularly political work represents Parekowhai's particular knack for using art to open up space for a debate on government and corporate actions drawing attention to the communities they impact. He was the New Zealand representative artist at the 54th Venice Biennale, exhibiting the sculptural installation On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer. Because of the range of his cultural references, he is one of Aotearoa/New Zealand's most often discussed sculptors. Parekowhai's works are found in all the major New Zealand municipal and national collections, and in overseas institutions too, such as the Queensland Art Gallery. ocula.com/artists/michael-parekowhai/ |
Digital Marae 2001
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MAORI ART IN CONTINUUMLisa Reihana (b.1964)Lisa Reihana is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice explores how identity and history are represented, and how these intersect with concepts of place and community. The subjects of Reihana’s portraiture inhabit a world in which the boundaries of past, present, and future are mutable; their identities are likewise unfixed and transgress everyday expectations of cultural and social norms.
“Her staged interpretations of Māori concepts and art forms have become signature works, representing a considered and personal translation of Māori cultural values and aesthetics and an expression of the dichotomy of her urban Māori experience”. Digital Marae 2001 employed large scale photography, short videos and aural soundscapes to create an environment which is a culturally rich meditation on Māori in modern times. This work has been shown extensively and continues to garner international renown. Reihana’s recent work, In Pursuit of Venus [infected](2015), represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2017. Filmed vignettes populate a neo-classical French wallpaper, Les Sauvages De La Mer Pacifique, recreating it as a 32 minute-long, 25m by 4m video installation. Amongst the images of the South Seas idyll portrayed in the original, the artist has interpolated narratives of sexual exploitation, dance, exploration, and violence. The imperial gaze has been re-packaged and turned back onto itself. In Pursuit of Venus[infected] premiered at the Auckland Art Gallery in May 2015 and has been on display at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art as part of the eighth Asia-Pacific Triennial; it has garnered large local audiences as well as widespread critical acclaim. Born in 1964, Lisa Reihana is of Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine and Ngāi Tu descent tribally connected to the Far North of New Zealand through her father Huri Waka Reihana. She graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University,with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1987, and recently completed her Master of Design through the Unitec Institute of Technology. Reihana has an extensive exhibition history in New Zealand and abroad and in 2014 she was awarded an Arts Laureate Award by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand. Her works are held in private and public collections including Te Papa Tongarewa; Auckland Art Gallery; Australia National Gallery; Staatliche Museum, Berlin; Susan O'Connor Foundation, Texas and Brooklyn Museum, New York. www.milfordgalleries.co.nz/dunedin/artists/143-Lisa-Reihana |
In Pursuit of Venus [infected] Venice Biennale 2017
RECENT WORK: A Song About Samoa 2019
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ADDRESSING CULTURAL BOUNDARIESYuki Kihara – New Zealand’s 2022 Venice Biennale representative - is an interdisciplinary artist of Japanese and Samoan descent. Working across a range of media including photography, performance and video, Kihara has built a comprehensive body of work and curatorial practice that examines gender roles, consumerism, (mis)representation, and the past, present and future societal issues from colonial and post-colonial perspectives. Inspiration for Kihara's work comes from a variety of sources, including nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial photographs made by non-indigenous artists who contributed to perceptions—many of them erroneous—about Pacific Islanders and their culture.
The photographic series Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? uses setting and character to make pointed allusions to the social, religious, economic and political issues facing Western Samoa in particular, and the Pacific at large. Referencing the staged photographic postcards of the ‘South Seas,’ Kihara turns the camera on her country’s colonial past, the impact of burgeoning globalisation, ideas of indigeneity and the role of government in an independent Samoa. Kihara “unpacks the myth” of her country as an untouched Pacific paradise as seen through the eyes of colonial powers and tourist photographs. In the series Fa'a fafine: In a Manner of a Woman, Kihara makes powerful statements about the depiction of Samoan people, shared memory, societal roles, and sexuality. The Samoan word fa'a fafine is best described in Western terms as a third gender. The artist, herself a fa'a fafine, re-creates studio tableaux similar to the scenes staged by nineteenth-century non-Samoan photographers such as Thomas Andrew and Alfred John Tattersall, where women and men were posed alone and as couples partially clothed and often with tropical foliage. In the triptych Kihara is seen on a couch in a provocative, reclining pose that evokes numerous historical photographs of lounging seductive women, often captioned as Samoan “belles.” The series is a powerful commentary directed at Western perceptions of Pacific Islanders and the sexual stereotypes that were generated by early images. Presented as male and female, Kihara confronts and challenges assumptions about gender identity. In 2008, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York presented a solo exhibition of Kihara’s work entitled Living Photographs, held at the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, featuring highlights of her interdisciplinary art practice, followed by an acquisition of her works by the museum for their permanent collection. Kihara's work can be found in national and international collections. www.milfordgalleries.co.nz/dunedin/artists/232-Yuki-Kihara www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2008/shigeyuki-kihara |
KIHARA'S IMPORTANT WORKS
Fa’afafine: In the Manner of a Woman, 2005 |
Taualuga: The Last Dance 2006 & Siva in Motion 2012
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Where do we come from? What are we?
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A Study of a Samoan Savage, 2016 |
Time depending: more NZ Artists:
Shane Cotton
Born in Upper Hutt in 1964 of Ngati Rangi, Ngati Hine and Te Uri Taniwha descent.
He is one of New Zealand's best-known contemporary painters. The intersection of his own Ngapuhi and Pakeha (New Zealand European) heritage is a running theme in his work. His paintings blend imagery and iconography from traditional and contemporary sources to reflect on contemporary experience. Cotton's early paintings were abstract; however, during the 1990s, he shifted to a representational style, influenced by the Maori figurative traditions that had emerged in New Zealand in the late nineteenth century. He has continued to use symbols and images that refer to significant events and issues in New Zealand's history, such as those related to land ownership and the preservation of Maori culture, often addressing them in an oblique fashion, combining popular culture, references to art history, and the traditional stories of New Zealand to create ambiguous pictorial and political constructions. His paintings simultaneously suggest European Old Masters and traditional Maori art but he does not offer to mediate between the two spheres, representing both as equivalences. In this way, Cotton's work steers clear of institutionalized bicultural didactics, instead taking up a position of speculative contemporary aesthetic investigation. Cotton's earlier works were lighter and gentler, painted in light and warm tones. His more recent series, however, with dark backgrounds and calculated placement of images, suggest a darker divinatory system with an obscured and ominous forecast. In these works, the iconography appears devoid of context; symbols and pictorial representations float in black space or dark voids of blue. The pictorial architecture in these works is unstable – perhaps a reflection on current times. By drawing on borrowed imagery to produce ambivalent narratives, Cotton produces contemporary echoes of the colonial aesthetics of early New Zealand art, which mixes traditional Maori arts with European influences. Through combinations of borrowed imagery from the West, Maori text, images of native New Zealand birds, target icons and upoko tuhituhi (decorated human heads), Cotton excavates periods of change and upheaval that have led to the present. Using bold, flat colours, often with a dark palette, his paintings provoke the viewer to make connections, looking from one image to another and considering the deep layers of history and iconography that inform contemporary experience in New Zealand. He lives and works in Palmerston North. Biennale of Sydney Shane Cotton was included in the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010. http://hamishmckay.co.nz/artists/Shane_Cotton |
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John Pule
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John Pule was born in Niue and since 1964 has lived in Auckland. He is largely self-taught.
Pule’s art considers the Pacific; its mythologies, histories, colonisation, Christianity and migrant cultures. His work is often provocative, for example: Christ’s crucifixion revealed in his large-scale paintings as a sick, destructive influence on indigenous culture. Conceived and constructed from the imagery and material of tapa cloth, the artist’s paintings also acknowledge the dynamics of migration, procreation and settlement, and the vitality and energy of the artist’s and all Pacific people’s identity. Pule has exhibited extensively in Australasia and been included in major survey exhibitions; Paradise Now?, New York (2004) and the Asia-Pacific Triennial (2006) at the Queensland Art Gallery (2006). In December 2011 Pule was given a major survey show John Pule: Hauaga (Arrivals) at the Auckland Art Gallery which ran through to late March 2012. In 2004 Pule received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Award. He has work in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery and Te Papa Tongarewa - Museum of New Zealand. In 2012 he was awarded an ONZM (Officer of the said Order) for services as an author, poet and painter in the Queen's Birthday Honours. https://ocula.com/artists/john-pule/ |