at Whirinaki Whare Taonga, 21 May – 27 June 2022
The second and penultimate exhibition of new work by members of Handshake_6, GLIMMER offers a sample of our current work as we build towards our final exhibition at Northart in Auckland later in the year.
Part of a larger series, ETHIOPIA considers the writing of historical narratives- who’s stories get written and how are they represented. Global events, such as the ongoing civil war in Ethiopia, despite their horrific human cost, become buried in the ‘international’ section of our Western news feeds and newspapers. Event’s involving cultures removed from our immediate points of reference (ie ‘history’) become relegated to a sensational headline or decontextualised image: those affected marginalised and othered. Difficult to comprehend and easily forgotten amongst the swath of reportage on our own immediate experiences, this project attempts to remind us of the plight of those less visible- let them not be forgotten to history.
Photo credit: Peter Deckers
Photo credit: Peter Deckers
We are saturated by images. More than ever before, our screen dominated epoch necessitates an image economy. Joan Didion famously opined “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”. Today a ‘story’ is a function of Instagram; story as ephemeral image. Yet there remains the potential for images to speak with power and endurance. Distinguishing photography as an image form unique in its uncoded and ‘continuous’ form, Roland Barthes once wrote “The press photograph is a message.” In the work ‘Ethiopia’, the press photograph is re-presented in the format of a Viewmaster reel.
The Viewmaster was first introduced at the 1939 New York World Fair, originally manufactured and sold by Sawyer’s photo business as an alternative to the scenic postcard. Subjects were traditionally focused on tourist attractions, but over time and various chang es of ownership, Viewmaster ‘reels’ increasingly focused on content from the entertainment industry, such as film and television, and over time towards child friendly content such as toys and cartoons.
The Viewmaster represents an uneasy intersection of toy as both entertainment and education; an early media device frequently bound up in the representation of racialised and colonial narratives and stereotypes. The Viewmaster provides us the opportunity to consider the role of design, specifically related to toys, in the enculturation of ideological systems of thought, specifically as related to the indoctrination of our youngest, and most vulnerable, citizens.
In this exhibition I have repurposed the Viewmaster to re-center narratives of human conflict and tragedy, those narratives that slip and slide from our consciousness. Here the Viewmaster returns to a role of documenting place. Yet these places are no picture postcards, these images representations of a series of contemporary social, political and cultural realities, that for whatever reason, may escape our invested attention.
‘GLIMMER’
WHIRINAKI WHARE TAONGA
UPPER HUTT
21 MAY – 27 JUNE 2022