Unnerved

The New Zealand Project

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One’s first encounter with Maud Page’s exhibition ‘Unnerved: The New Zealand Project’ was two gigantic inflatable rabbits, their seven-metre stature demanding a presence in the Gallery of Modern Art’s (GoMA’s) lofty atrium. They are Michael Parekowhai’s Cosmo McMurtry (2006) and Jim McMurtry (2004) and they performed the role of gate-keepers along with Parekowhai’s Kapa Haka (Whero) (2003), a more conventional gallery guard cast in fibreglass—overweight, bored and ‘brown’. The trio have a Disney-like polish and yet the tableau had an uneasiness about it, echoed in the hysterical tag of the exhibition’s title scrawled high on a wall and in one of the rabbits being splayed out comatose. It set up the dark undercurrent to this exhibition, its tensions and erosions delivered with deadpan expression and surety.

To enter the galleries one passed through a black scrim to dimly lit spaces painted charcoal grey. The note was sombre. The visitor was immediately confronted with Nathan Pohio’s intimate video, Landfall of a spectre (2007), a tall ship caught in misty nostalgia; the work’s repetitive loop snared one into its nightmare of a turgid sea. It offered the sensation of voyaging into the unknown, and as a metaphor it described superbly the unleashed territory that is contemporary New Zealand art.

The second in the Queensland Art Gallery’s country-based exhibitions—an initiative started in 2009 with ‘The China Project’—‘Unnerved’ assembled over one hundred and twenty artworks, largely from the Gallery’s collection and stretching from the 1960s to the present. It is perhaps the most comprehensive survey of contemporary New Zealand art since the 1992 landmark exhibition ‘Headlands: Thinking through New Zealand Art’ presented at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It differed in that it drew... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Duncan Cole (Photographer), Shigeyuki Kihara (Concept developer), Daughter of the high chief, (from Savage nobility series), 2001. Printed 2004. Gelatin silver photograph, ed. 1/2. 46.7 x 59.3cm. Purchased 2004. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant. Collection Queensland Art Gallery.

Michael Parekowhai, The Horn of Africa, 2006. Automotive paint, wood, fibreglass, steel, brass, 395 x 200 x 260cm. Purchased 2008 with funds from the Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund. Collection Queensland Art Gallery