This is us
"This is New Zealand’’ is the first exhibition at City Gallery Wellington since its four-month closure for restoration. It’s a great exhibition to open with – a look at New Zealanders describing themselves.
If there is one thing about the New Zealand identity that you can say, it is that it is constantly obsessed with its identity.
Is it because we are so far away, tucked in the bottom of the world? Or is it that our late colonisation has given us less time to have found our feet as a people? Or is it just the country’s entrepreneurial spirit that seeks to market and invent?
I don’t think there is anywhere else in the world where people spend so much effort in package and parcelling up symbols and expressions of their country. Whether ‘‘Made in NZ’’, ‘‘Clean and Green’’ (that one has come back to bite), buzzy bees, jandals, Southern Man, pavlova or sheep – Kiwifying things has become something of a compulsive disorder.
The City Gallery Wellington picked up this theme with ‘‘This is New Zealand’’, an exhibition of some of the artworks used for expos and other overseas events, inspired by looking back at the New Zealand participation in the Venice Biennale (since 2001), the exhibition then extending its net to include World Fair entries and expos, making it not just more comprehensive, but filling out the background of earlier, perhaps unremembered days.
The title itself is taken from film made by Hugh Macdonald for the NZ Pavilion at Osaka’s Expo ‘70. That, along with footage of an opening ceremony with photographs of ballet costumes to choreograph New Zealand’s mythological origins, in the manner of sports opening ceremonies, portrays a world that seems touchingly naive and straightforward.
When you make your way upstairs and try to sort through the muddle of parts of Simon Denny’s biennale entry – information and symbols on stark glass and steel frames – you feel as if we have certainly now left Eden’s garden. Bronwyn Holloway-smith’s study of the Southern Cross Cable (that carries New Zealand internet data to the world), a stepped-out tour, including one look diving in the Hauraki Gulf to investigate it leaving our shores and another stop at a rediscovered Mervyn Taylor tiled mural (that kitschy optimism of the story of Maui fishing up the North Island) again seemed to show an ever increased awareness of the serpent.
The exhibition works are predominantly large scale, set out to make the ‘‘big splash’’, tending even to a room each devoted to their display: Michael Stevenson’s Trekka (the early New Zealand car, like a giant toy) from a biennale; Parekowhai’s piano, its gleaming red set off with accolades of flowers from the photographs from his ‘‘The Consolation of Philosophy’’ series, 2001; a Gavin Hipkins photographic frieze depicting shots by the Kiwi traveller at home and away.
These works tend to be the main framework of the exhibition. But then mixed in are all sorts of surprises, like the enormous painted work by John Drawbridge, an abstract in brave blocks of colour that spans a wall, and some obvious smaller fits –1950s tourist posters and historical paintings by Marcus King, and Fiona Pardington’s photographs of tiki.
This mix, through time and with that altered perspective that comes with it, is part of what makes the exhibition so fascinating. I feel as if parts two, three and four could still be mounted, such is the wealth of materials – the stories we tell of ourselves.