Connecting through his art
Artist Kelcy Taratoa says painting in the 21st century has something important to say and a responsibility to do so. Warren Feeney reports.
At more than 4 metres in length, Kelcy Taratoa’s Big City is a big painting with a bright-red army tank in front of the entrance to a Woolworths shopping complex.
Is it the detail from a Reuters news story or an image from a digital game that promises more than just another day in the shopping mall? The hand with the remote in the foreground suggests it could be about to change the television channel on either option.
Big City is also the title of a survey exhibition of more than a decade of Kelcy Taratoa’s paintings at the newly opened Nadene Milne Gallery in Christchurch. In solo exhibitions that have included Kelcytaratoa:my space at the Christchurch Art Gallery in 2007 and the international group exhibition Roundabout at City Gallery Wellington and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel in 2010, Taratoa’s paintings consider the volatility of personal and community identity in a digitally globalised world.
As the largest painting in the gallery, standing in front of Big City is an all-encompassing experience, but not of the virtual kind. Rather, it is a tangible real world encounter. Taratoa trusts that gallery visitors will take the time to think about the difference. Painting in the 21st century, he maintains, has something important to say and a responsibility to do so.
‘‘Increasingly, our interaction with our world is experienced virtually, and I take the position that artists are accountable to the public for what they display in a public context. As a visual arts practitioner, I believe I have a responsibility to engage in matters of importance to the time that I live in.’’
Taratoa (Ngai Te Rangi, Ngati Raukaw) attended Te Putahi-a-Toi, Massey University, from 1999 to 2005 and was tutored by Professor of Maori visual arts Robert Jahnke and painter Shane Cotton. He gained significant national attention following his graduation from Massey through paintings that relocated Marvel’s comicbook heroes and their film and PlayStation counterparts into New Zealand’s streets and cities.
He recalls that his 2007 exhibition of these works at the Christchurch Art Gallery was a wonderful experience. ‘‘I enjoyed my time at the gallery. I had a seminar and I was working with schools and running workshops. It was a real sharing experience for me and I have very fond memories.’’
He says that the superheroes of his childhood were typically ‘‘outsiders’’ and that as a youth he identified with their predicament, feeling similarly disconnected growing up in the ‘‘detribalised’’ township of New Plymouth.
‘‘When I made that statement, I was thinking about this condition as part of a conversation addressing what I see as the link between history, social situations and identity construction. The objective of colonisation was to subjugate and assimilate Maori. The impact of that process has left many Maori, including myself at one time, detribalised and culturally displaced.
‘‘However, I do not consider myself an individual with a Maori world view. Rather, what I have is a world view – with Maori in it. I am of Chinese, Maori, English, Scottish, Welsh and Italian descent. It makes total sense to me to have a world view that is inclusive. Ultimately, what we all have in common is that which is central to our collective experience, the capacity for feeling and the capacity for thought.’’
The circumstances and state of humanity are central to Taratoa’s work. Whether a painting like Big City, where he makes us conscious of our compulsive appetite for amusement and stimulation, or in other paintings where each person is pixilated to virtual extinction, or reduced to an anonymous silhouette, or framed as the subject of a digital camera’s lens – all the figures in Big City are either numerous steps removed from reality, or defined with greater clarity, as subjects for surveillance by anonymous cameras.
Taratoa is concerned about our increasing disconnection with the physical, intellectual and emotional realities important to our lives and the invasive nature of technology and its seemingly limitless potential as a tool for surveillance and gathering information about our behaviours.
‘‘Technology is packaged to appeal to that human appetite and desire for convenience and selfgratification, for entertainment and increased protection from a ‘perceived’ threat. With every notification from a multiplicity of digital platforms, we merge with this virtual construction, fabricated to be only an alternative reality, and not reality itself.
‘‘I find myself asking the question, ‘What world are we inheriting?’ We consider ourselves to be more connected to people and communities than ever before. I would argue that we are actually disconnected because of the digital/virtual platforms we invest in, in order to be connected.
‘‘Are these not merely artificial illusions of connectedness? Human connectivity is about sharing a physical and intelligible space and time with dialogue, being present in the moment. Maori have an expression that I value greatly: ‘Kanohi ki te kanohi’. It means to meet and converse face-to-face – to look into the eyes and the being of a person in the moment of connection – not screen-to-screen.’’
Taratoa maintains that one of the most potent works of art of the modern era remainsPablo Picasso’s Guernica, the artist’s response to the bombing of Spanish civilians by the Germans and Italians in 1937.
‘‘It depicts what happens when we relinquish power to a system, designed to privilege but a few. History teaches us that these few become intoxicated with their power and authority and wield it to commit the most heinous acts against humanity. I have a belief, not in religion or a god, but in the human capacity to learn to understand what it means to be human.
‘‘I like to think that my work operates on levels of feeling and understanding. This means that people bring their knowledge to the subject(s) being addressed, and feel and think their way in and around the work. Art should be slow. Over time spent with a work, the dialogue between viewer and artwork grows.
‘‘Art provides an opportunity to slow time, to be suspended for a moment to consider what is being proposed. One needs time to feel, to think, to respond and this is a notion, it seems, in opposition to a world that is speeding up.
‘‘Art has the potential to connect with our humanness both individually and collectively – to recognise humanness in others. Picasso painted Guernica to remind us of everything we should not be, or allow to be, in this world of ours.’’ ❚ Kelcy Taratoa, Big City, Nadene Milne Gallery, 10 Bath St, July 21 until August 12.