NEW ZEALAND
Wellington
This Is New Zealand
City Gallery, 3 March–15 July STELLA RAMAGE City Gallery celebrates its reopening with a gallery-wide exhibition of eclectic works investigating how artists and advertisers have represented New Zealand to the world and contributed to our narratives of national identity. Curators Robert Leonard and Aaron Lister write their critical intention on the wall:
Teasing out connections between images, ideology and identity This Is New Zealand reflects on who we thought we were, who we think we are. Taking a critical look at stories we’ve told ourselves and others, it asks: Who and what has been included and excluded? And who is this mythical we?
The works can be categorised according to intention. Some simply aimed to promote New Zealand and ‘New Zealand-ness’ uncritically to overseas audiences (and hence, inevitably, to domestic ones); others offer deeper analyses. In the former category is a gorgeous display in the Deane Gallery of tourist posters from the 1930s to 1960s. Lest visitors be seduced by sunlit fantasies, however, the swollen carcass of Peter Peryer’s Dead Steer (1987) is included as counterpoint.
Next door in the Hirschfeld Gallery, Emil McAvoy’s The National Basement (2009) presents a postmodern commentary on national promotion. This is a series of digitised black-and-white photographs retrieved from Archives New Zealand that documented displays constructed by the National Publicity Studio from the 1940s to 1980s. Never intended for public consumption, they show unglamorous workspace reality, even as the photos within the photos present familiar nationalist iconography.
Downstairs, the tension between flying the flag and eyeing it quizzically is again played out over two galleries. On one side are works celebrating New Zealand’s place in a brave new postwar modernism fuelled by the boom of the 1960s: John Drawbridge’s massive abstract (1963), created for New Zealand House in London; Inia Te Wiata’s injection of Maori carving into the heart of that building (, 1971); and Hugh Macdonald’s 20-minute movie montage, (1969), the title of which the curators have appropriated. Made for in Osaka but subsequently shown to delighted audiences throughout New Zealand, Macdonald’s film is exuberant propaganda for the half-gallon, quarter-acre pavlova paradise. An innovative three-screen set-up was used, often wittily, to display industry, agriculture,
