NZ sculptor takes over in Brisbane

Michael Parekowhai: The Promised Land
Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA)
Until June 21

If you want to see a great New Zealand sculpture exhibition, you need to go to Brisbane.

The Gallery of Modern Art is showing a large collection of the Michael Parekowhai’s work under the title of The Promised Land, which includes many of his key works from New Zealand collections as well from the gallery’s own collection.

Parekowhai is a mixture of humourist, philosopher, storyteller and cultural commentator, with his work dealing with the intersections between national narratives, colonial histories and popular culture.

One of the central works in the show is his carved piano which was part of his exhibition when he represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale, a work which brought together a number of references to New Zealand history, combining low and high culture, in-jokes and personal biography.

The exhibition also includes the major commission he undertook in 2011 for the grounds of the gallery. With this work, The World Turns, Parekowhai cast a large bronze elephant, based on a traditional elephant bookend but turned so its face and trunk are on the earth. The elephant’s eye looks down on a small native water rat, the kuril, which is regarded as one of the caretakers of the land on which the gallery and the sculpture stand.

The World Turns, which has all the elements of a child’s story or a myth, speaks of the bringing together of different cultures and viewpoints as well as the notion that both small and large events create the history of mankind.

The work also links to a work in the Queensland Art Gallery’s collection “The skin speaks a language of its own” by Bharti Kher, which uses thousands of tiny white bindis to cover the surface of a full-sized fibreglass elephant, which appears to be on the brink of death.

The exhibition covers 25 years of his practice from one of his art school works After Dunlop (1989), a handcrafted version of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Bicycle Wheel through to the specially designed State House work containing a stainless steel sculpture of James Cook “The English Channel” (2015). As with many of the artist's works there are many references to and copies of the work of other artists. So as well as Duchamp’s Bicycle “ there are also Duchamp’s urinal readymades – Mimi (1994), a reworked copy of the Nathaniel Dance’s portrait of Cook and images based on a Rene Magritte figure, “Rainbow Servant Dreaming.”

He also takes inspiration from existing man-made objects such as the state house, Cuisenaire rods and a set of pick-up-sticks The exhibition is in three parts, the first being the state house containing the Dance inspired image of Cook who is nearly twice life size sitting on a modelling table as though just having been completed by the artist, contemplating his place in the exhibition.

The interior walls of the house are decorated with small images of the security figure “Kapa Haka” and the bowler-hatted Magritte figure. These two images combine to make something of a self-portrait of the artist, one being based on his brother and the other based on one of the more enigmatic artists.

The central series of small rooms with many of the artists smaller works is contained by two giant walls made up of Cuisenaire rods, objects which are intended for the teaching of maths but appear to be equally able to be the basis of an abstract artist's work.

The works in this area provide an overview of the artist’s career with sculptures, installations, photographs and light boxes. There are 10 of his World War I memorial photographs of flower arrangements, two of his ballerina sculptures “The Song of the Frog” and “The Horn of Africa,” which has a piano balanced on the nose of a seal. Here also was his “The Big OE,” his VW Kombi van parked in a woodland of fibreglass tree trunks. This work tells of the young New Zealander travelling around Europe in a van, a mixture of cultural finishing school and cultural cringe.

This notion of a hemisphere translocation is then mirrored in the photographs of introduced rabbits “Craig Keller” and “Neil Keller,” symbolic of how an introduced species has changed the nature of the New Zealand landscape.

The last area features “He Kōrero Pūrākau mo te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand River”, the ornately carved red Steinway grand that featured in Parekowhai’s contribution to Venice Biennale exhibition. It draws on a number of sources such as the Jane Mander book and the Jane Campion film The Piano.

It is also an interesting metaphor about the interplays between European and Maori culture, the way that each has been influenced by the other. It is surrounded by cast bronze school chairs and bathed in the flickering light of a large neon sign “The Rules of the Game” which alternates between CLOSED and LOSE. The garish coloured sign looks as though he has taken parts of old style neon signs and incorporated them into his own readymade version. The sign links back several years to a similar retro sign created in Wellington which read OPEN. Just another of the artist's clever, continuing visual jokes which link popular culture, high art and his own aesthetic journey.