Wall Panels
Small World, Big Town: Wall Panels
Welcome Panel
Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to ‘Small World, Big Town: Contemporary Art from Te Papa’.
This exhibition is a partnership project between City Gallery Wellington and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. ‘Small World, Big Town: Contemporary Art from Te Papa’ presents a substantial number of contemporary New Zealand works from Te Papa’s visual art collections, selected by curators from both institutions. ‘Small World, Big Town’ offers an exciting and diverse range of contemporary New Zealand art, from iconic works to recent aquisitions.
‘Small World, Big Town’ reflects a shift in focus over recent decades: moving away from an engagement with nationhood—which characterised much previous New Zealand art—to an interest in the wider world and individual experience. If the work in this exhibition focuses on the local and the immediate, it also addresses our growing sense of belonging to a global community. As the world appears to shrink in scale, artists now get their bearings from all over the place: from far-flung towns to distant locations. ‘Small World, Big Town’ offers audiences an affectionate look at ourselves as a big town on the periphery of an increasingly smaller world; remote, yet globally connected.
The exhibition is divided into three sections; ‘Little People’, ‘Highway to Hicksville’ and ‘Outer Limits’, each offering a different perspective. ‘Little People’ showcases art which is close-up and personal, while ‘Highway to Hicksville’ explores location, specifically the regional small town. ‘Outer Limits’ takes a broad span—from the world to the universe.
City Gallery Wellington would like to thank the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa for their partnership and support of this exhibition project, as well as the artists whose work this exhibition showcases. We would also like to thank the sponsors who have supported the project including the exhibition’s Principal Sponsor, Simpson Grierson; Montana Wines; and our core funders—the Wellington Museums Trust and Wellington City Council.
Highway to Hicksville
‘Highway to Hicksville’ takes a journey out of the city to small town New Zealand. This country’s provinces have recently provided rich creative fodder for films and literature such as Whale Rider, Featherstone, and In My Father’s Den. Visual artists have also found the everyday vernacular of small communities compelling, often with a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of what it takes to live outside the centre.
Emma Bugden, co-curator of ‘Small World, Big Town’ writes: ‘who needs nationalism when you can have the regional, the idiosyncratic, the personal, the eccentric, the folkloric, and the crafty? The artworks in “Highway to Hicksville” sidestep any attempt to flag-bear for the nation by simply focusing on interesting diversions close-at-hand.’
An artist who has long had an interest in storytelling is Saskia Leek, whose childhood re-imaginings tell wistful tales of small town life. Such fantastical musings are also apparent in Land list (1996), where Bill Hammond’s characteristic bird-people have left the forest to wander into the nearest town, populated by billboard slogans such as ‘Leisure Land’, ‘Liquor Land’ and ‘Gang Land’.
In Dylan Horrocks’ graphic novel Hicksville (2001), the mythical district of the title might be isolated, yet the sheep farmers and fishermen who live there passionately discuss obscure comic books. Less rural but equally parochial, Yvonne Todd’s photographs mine both the suburbs and her own background as a former wedding photographer for their source material.
An artwork in close-up is Brendon Wilkinson’s diorama The gauntlet (2002-03). Wilkinson’s depiction of an ordinary looking section of train tracks, with bus and train stations bombed by tiny graffiti, is contrasted with the remnants of a bloody battle scene. Conflict is again suggested by the bomber plane of Peter Robinson’s My marae, my Methven (1994); while Michael Shepherd takes a less oblique angle on military history, painting a row of army vehicles in the desert, mimicking the effects of old wartime photographs. The vehicles, however, each bear the name of New Zealand small towns—Te Aroha, Tirau, Te Paki. The work memorialises some of the rural communities which lost young men to various world wars.
The sometimes claustrophobic nature of isolated communities is apparent in Fiona Pardington’s photograph Choker (1994), where dark bruises discolour the soft flesh of a woman’s neck. Ava Seymour’s House at Cannons Creek (1997) also offers a darker view; a family of strangely distorted people stand in front of a standard weatherboard state house—a disconcerting vision of the poor and disenfranchised.
Other artworks in ‘Highway to Hicksville’ are concerned with habitation and architecture. Derrick Cherrie’s Studio (2001) is a kit-set house complete with toilet, staircase and fireplace, as structurally sound as a family home. Cherrie has described this work as a ‘theatre space’—an imaginary dwelling which at half-scale we can never really inhabit. Andrew McLeod’s computer drawings resemble architectural plans, but not for any conventional building. Trees have invaded the rooms, text covers walls; the plans appear to map social engagement as much as physical construction. Mapping is also important in Mladen Bizumic’s ‘Aipotu’ series of works (2004), where the grid system of Manhattan has been traced onto the organic contours of Stewart Island. Like many works in this exhibition, the ‘Aipotu’ works collapse the city and the wilderness into each other.
Little People
In ‘Little People’ the inward gaze is given preference over the outward view. This section presents a variety of explorations and interpretations of both the self and life. As ‘Small World Big Town’ co-curator Natasha Conland writes: ‘of interest is the intimacy of perspective which they require of the viewer. These are works which expand the subject but don’t over awe it’.
Many of the artists included in ‘Little People’ appropriate images directly from the outside world in order to present their own viewpoint. In these appropriations the world is often depicted as either larger or smaller than life, reducing reality to a perfect replica. Changing the scale of the world in this way both comments on the original image and reinforces, as Conland has written, ‘the subjectivity of the view depicted’.
Such miniaturisation can be seen in Marie Shannon’s photographs, several of which record model dioramas as though they were real. In King for a day (1991), a pipe cleaner figure reclines leisurely in bed, while in the Wild side in me (1989) a miniature paper dog barks amidst a forest of stick trees. Lauren Lysaght’s elaborate constructions are similarly handcrafted. The three works included here from the series ‘Hidden agender’ (1993) tell the life story of Eugenia Falleni, Lysaght’s transsexual ancestor from nineteenth-century Italy. The various adventures which befell Falleni are here portrayed in a series of tiny but dramatic tableaux which explore the politics of gender.
In contrast, the chess pieces in Michael Parekowhai’s work Folie à deux (1994) are sized up to gigantic proportions. Engaged in a game of move and counter-move, the black and white of Parekowhai’s chess pieces can be read as a metaphor for the sometimes binary positions of cultural politics. Anne Noble’s camera lens is also set to close-up in the photographic series ‘Touch Memory’ (1999), zooming in on parts of the body with a forensic attention to detail.
Margaret Dawson is playing dress-ups in her photographs from the ‘Men from uncle’ series (1995-97), which depict her elderly uncle taking on the identity of writers, musicians and artists he admired. Portraiture is also a concern to Richard Reddaway and Peter Stichbury. While Reddaway’s sculptural work No shades of grey (1990) reduces the human form to a series of geometric shapes and twists, Stichbury’s work Chester Karnofsky (2004) presents a seductive portrait of a young boy,with features exaggerated into implausible beauty.
With a somewhat less idealised spirit, Ronnie van Hout’s Nice and stupid (1995) uses self-deprecating humour in a piece which matches the personal with the paranoid. The potent twentieth-century symbol of the swastika is paired with a strangely melted head which mutters words filled with doubt: ‘…don’t think I’m up to this…I’m tired…’. Well-known for his comical positioning of himself in opposition to a threatening situation, van Hout places himself centre stage in the gallery, with a unique and individual point of view.
Outer Limits
The boundaries of our knowledge and experience are constantly expanding. ‘Outer Limits’ features artworks which seek to create far-reaching connections, both globally and universally. ‘Small World Big Town’ co-curator Gregory O’Brien has written that ‘in recent decades the world has grown a whole lot bigger the smaller it has become—so has the universe. “Outer Limits” takes us beyond boundaries of the known into far off regions in time and space’.
The subconscious mind has given artists a vast terrain to work with. Tapping into what philosopher C.G. Jung termed the ‘collective unconscious’, contemporary artists often use universal symbols to tell stories about who we are or who we might be. Niue-born artist John Pule’s work draws on mythology as well as his own personal history to create a patchwork of conflicting and complimentary scenes. Mythology permeates the work of John Walsh, whose painting Hine Titama becomes Hine Nui Te Po
(2002) draws on the legend of how Hine Nui Te Po became the guardian of the underworld.
Michael Harrison’s small watercolour paintings also engage with mysticism, often using the motif of the cat, an ancient symbol of power and eroticism. His paintings suggest dream-like states of communication. As Harrison has said: ‘you can have a whole symbolic system of knowledge that doesn’t have to do with words’.
As well as exploring the unknown travels of the spirit, global connections are also a concern to the artists in ‘Outer Limits’. One narrative which draws the world closer together is that of migration. Ani O’Neill’s Star by night (1994) is an eloquent reminder of what we take with us when we journey far from home. Using the craft traditions of her homeland Rarotonga, she weaves florist’s ribbon into an elaborate night sky. O’Neill references her ancestors’ navigation across the Pacific ocean using the stars to guide them. Her work suggests that we navigate by what we don’t know, as much as what we know.
Navigation is also a concern for Ruth Watson, whose work Mappa mundi (1986-88) is named after a medieval attempt to map the then unknown realms of the world. Watson’s own map is more personal; it offers details of the human body, in lieu of compass points.
At the same time, new technologies are breaking down the distance between New Zealand and the rest of the world. The internet and tourism provide two sources for global movement. Gavin Hipkins’ work gathers a seemingly random selection of images from on-line pornography sites and travel brochures. The international marketplace also leads to migration: Yuk King Tan’s Island Portrait (2004) captures the present-day shipping out of Chinese workers to Pacific Islands—in this case to Rarotonga to build a courthouse.
‘Space, the Final Frontier’ was a catch-cry of the 1970s, but the cosmos is no longer the furtherest boundary we can comprehend. We live in an age of molecular science and quantum physics. Boyd Webb’s photograph Entomb (1993) offers an imaginative inhabitation of the strange new territories that exist somewhere between physical and imagined worlds.