(Blue Oyster Art Project Space)
Jimmy Ma’ia’i is an Auckland-based artist who has made his home in Avondale.
The suburb, jutting into the Waitematā at the western end of the central city, has long been a hub for Pacific Island people, but the city’s changing demographics and increasing property values have slowly seen the erosion of this base as gentrification has gradually pushed the Pasifika community out.
Ma’ia’i has watched this erosion, and comments on it with "4 HIRE".
Using found objects and heavily synthetic materials, he has created a paean to lost community and an indictment on Pasifika marginalisation.
Repeated prints of hibiscus flowers, a symbol both of northern New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, are arrayed against a background of hi-vis orange, a symbol of the loss of space and community as diggers move in. A series of commercial flags, indicating companies and development open for business form a double motif, both as the banana leaves which are similarly being uprooted, and also as a distant echo of outrigger sails and migration.
Most powerful of all is a striking construction, based on traditional siapo cloth but again using the all-pervasive colours of hi-vis. The message here is simple: the diggers may move in, the people may be displaced, but the culture remains.
(Brett McDowell Gallery)
Banner is a continuation of Richard Killeen’s extended series of works using juxtaposed stereotypical motifs to create new meaning.
The artist has a digital catalogue of hundreds of images which he uses as the basis for his art. In the current exhibition, he produces a series of "samplers" and "stacks". The stack forms are generally clean, clear, and straightforward, three of four items (or, in some cases, jars full of items) placed alongside each other to form combinations which seemingly have a hidden message. They become Rorschach tests, with the observer prompted to find their own meaning.
The sampler works, by comparison, are deliberately busy and cluttered with symbols and textures. The aim here is to represent the ever-increasing complexity of everyday life, in which we are bombarded by symbols and signs from all directions. We are overloaded, not knowing where the signal is in the noise, or how to interpret what we perceive.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of the exhibition is the deliberate banality of the titles: Stack, Sampler, and Banner. Killeen, who always loves to toy with words as well as images, is perhaps saying that the increase in noise has reduced the power of the simple spoken word — we have all become, in the words of Paul Simon, people hearing without listening.
(Fe29 Gallery)
Viky Garden presents a troika of exhibitions within her current display at Fe29.
The bulk of her works are a series of new paintings, many of them her trademark otherworldly portraits, heavily painted pieces in which women’s faces loom from a mist of texture and pattern. The faces stare, not with composure, but with an air of quiet unease, a sense that these are troubled lives yet their stories will forever remain silent. They are stories for the declining world, one of claustrophobia and concern.
Three of these works, the "rabbit" paintings, are sharp allegories of strife and division, the women’s faces masked by the features of rabbits, dehumanising them and rendering them as mere objects to be manipulated by politics, war and the media.
The depersonalisation of women is also a subtext in a series of three gently humorous but very powerful Sisterhood sculptures of "female warriors going nowhere".
The final group of works are more personal, and very poignant. A repeated print which, because of the processes used, shifts and changes with each iteration, is used to commemorate (and as catharsis from) the artist’s mother’s slow retreat into dementia. All the emotions of grief, anger and vulnerability combine in devastating form in this series of simple images of a pear.
By James Dignan
