CAG’s new immersive artwork
Christchurch Art Gallery is taking an artwork out of the traditional exhibition space, reports Warren Feeney.
The Christchurch Art Gallery has a new public artwork and a new-found location for its Outer Spaces projects.
Natalia Saegusa’s Tomorrow Still Comes/ He Ra Ano Ki Tua is located in the long corridor leading to the gallery’s carpark off Gloucester St. It is in the good company of Reuben Patterson’s glittering experience, The End, in the gallery’s downstairs elevator and Seraphine Pick’s counterculture happening, Untitled (Bathers), in the carpark elevator.
Tomorrow Still Comes/ He Ra Ano Ki Tua is an immersive encounter. A text installation extending the length of the corridor walls from Gloucester St to the carpark with words, letters and phrases in English and te reo, it’s capable of surprising unsuspecting foot-traffic with the open-ended possibilities of ideas, phrases and memories that seem to materialise and disperse as visitors make their way to and from the gallery.
Curator Felicity Milburn says that Saegusa’s Tomorrow Still Comes/ He Ra Ano Ki Tua adds to an important aspect of the gallery’s programme for arts projects that take place beyond its traditional exhibition spaces, within and around its building on Montreal St.
‘‘Outer Spaces started as an extension of our in-house programme in 2008, but when earthquakes closed the gallery in 2011, everything we did had to take that form. Since getting back inside, we’ve naturally concentrated on exhibitions within our spaces, but we remain very aware of other areas where we can keep that Outer Spaces experience going.
‘‘The gallery is always looking for opportunities to activate other spaces in the building – we’re never sure what will be next. Previously, the Gloucester St entrance opened directly onto the underground car park, but the retro-fitting of base isolators down there meant that, along with increased resilience of the building, we now have a new corridor to play with.’’
Saegusa has recently completed her first year of post-graduate study at the Elam School of Arts and Tomorrow Still Comes/ He Ra Ano Ki Tua is the second significant artwork that she has undertaken for a public gallery. In 2015, the Ashburton Art Gallery commissioned another here, an 8.3 by 3.3 metre mural for Stealing Lines, an exhibition scheduled to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the gallery’s opening.
Milburn says that this experience was important in selecting the artist. ‘‘We wanted an emerging artist with an interesting practice. It was a difficult space to work with; the long, narrow corridor meant the work had to address the experience of moving through it. There are also a lot of technical elements present, like pipes, seals, fire sensors, etc. I knew Natalia had done a large-scale project for the Ashburton Art Gallery, so we felt she could deal with the space, and we liked the delicacy in her use of colour.’’
Saegusa says that she has always been interested in writing and words and texts. ‘‘They can have the same ambiguities as visual images and that’s something I think about a lot, the different contexts that we use language in and the written word.
‘‘English is not my first language. I grew up in a house where English wasn’t the only language that was spoken. Although it is hard to get many people to think outside their normal tongue, it isn’t for anyone who has learnt a second language. I am no longer bilingual, but I remember what it was like to switch between two languages and seeing differing perspectives and conceptions. It is a huge loss, so this work is also a lament.
‘‘I am also interested in conceptual art from the 1970s. It was the end of the era of the counterculture and dreams of utopia for the Western world. You can see that in conceptual art. Art silenced itself through over thinking. That’s why I have been interested in concrete poetry. You can mould the idea and the object together and there is also a contradiction in an idea being expressed in a concrete poem.’’
Tomorrow Still Comes/ He Ra Ano Ki Tua‘s text was translated into te reo by Corban Te Aika of Ngai Tahu and then retranslated into English. As part of that process, Milburn says, ‘‘the translation gradually shifted Natalia’s fragmented, stream-of consciousness language into a more defined series of images’’.
The font selected for the text is Trajan. Alluding to Trajan’s triumphal column in Rome, it is immediately recognisable for its association with memorials and commemorative sculpture. Saegusa says the choice was significant. ‘‘I am interested in memorial culture as an art form and an aesthetic. For me, the work is about a text carved in stone.’’
Milburn says Saegusa was interested in making use of the gallery’s collection in her research and we knew Bill Sutton had painted stone inscriptions during his trip to Italy in the 1970s and Saegusa enjoyed the fact that these works were painted by someone who was temporarily displaced and then brought them back into a New Zealand context. The idea of slippage and shifting points of view is now such a part of the experience of Christchurch. The delicate colours used for Tomorrow Still Comes/ He Ra Ano Ki Tua were chosen from one particular work by Sutton, Forum Romanum (1974), but they’re also colours you might find in an earlymorning Canterbury sky.
‘‘Natalia worked with the Gallery’s graphic designer, Peter Bray, on a scaled paper model. Down in the space, she worked with our team to translate this onto the wall. Stencils were made in Trajan font, and the letters spray painted on the wall. Once they were dry, she washed the wall with a series of overlaying colours. She wanted to take advantage of the walk through the space as central to the experience of the work. So it’s site specific, but conceived within the larger arc of her practice.’’
Saegusa also says that the work is very much of its time. ‘‘We are in a very special time period in Aotearoa in what it means to be in a bilingual culture. I love going on an Air New Zealand flight. On their screens there are quizzes in English and te reo Maori, so there is this world and another world, and they live side by side.
‘‘I once had this retail job at Noel Leeming and the wages were based on how well you could sell items. The manager tried to motivate us with, ‘imagine that this is your shop’. As an artist that is what you are always doing as well. Tomorrow Still Comes/ He Ra Ano Ki Tua isn’t my artwork. These words are all floating together and they all mean nothing and something. The size of the text and the spacing between the texts make the space into a word document. Your body is a cursor that walks through that text. It is your story for you to make your own connections.’’ ❚ Entrance to Tomorrow Still Comes/ He Ra Ano Ki Tua is from Gloucester St, or inside the Christchurch Art Gallery’s carpark. The three texts are on the wall in the space as part of the didactic and also on the gallery’s website, where they’ll be joined by the audio version of spoken and sung texts once those recordings are complete.