Te Hīkoi Toi: taking humans out of the picture

This article on At Thresholds and Triple Feature was originally published in the Dominion Post.

“See it for yourself”, encourages City Gallery Wellington’s current marketing campaign, across banners, posters and online ads. A post-pandemic call to action: get your bodies out to galleries and museums, to in-person experiences. But how do we feel about this? Shaky, at best, after this winter of continuing sickness and war in Europe, and unprecedented temperatures and rain.

Ironically, given the marketing angle, the Gallery’s two new exhibitions are about what we can’t see, what is at the limits of our human knowledge and vision, and what other experiences are possible when our eyes are closed.

At Thresholds, a timely new group show curated by Moya Lawson, questions the relationship between humans and nature. What does nature keep hidden? How do we show care, and behave collectively with the many species that we share the planet with? The show is less a 1970s-esque lesson in what nature can teach us bumbling humans, more nuanced exploration of what nature rightfully withholds, and how it acts as a political agent in its own right.

Emily Parr’s photograph ‘Flukeprint’ (2021) is an entry point; it is printed on the show’s large banner and faces you as you first enter the gallery. We see an ocean where one patch in the middle is noticeably smoother than the choppy waves that surround it. As the title of the work reveals, this is the patch left behind by a diving paikea (humpback whale), as its fluke slaps and slips back into the sea. We can’t follow the whale and we can’t see it any more. The photo records this moment of disappearance, when the natural world stretches away, deeper and further, than we can hope to follow.

Zina Swanson’s art has long prowled the space between human bodies and plants. Her exquisite paintings often show bare branches and plants intersecting with human body parts or objects: shoes, bracelets, and noses. At City Gallery, in the work ‘Forget Me Not’ (2019), a cloud of blue forget-me-nots are dried and pressed into the shape of a human head in profile, which is pockmarked by eyes with forget-me-not pupils. Eyes and vision are often closed off or replaced in her work. What might we experience when we, like plants, can’t see? A deeper understanding, perhaps? Would we be more alert, ears pricked, to tiny signals from our environment?

At Thresholds is full and varied; it includes work in lots of different media, and artists from across generations and ethnic identities. It does what great group shows do: shares work by artists you already know, surprises you with others, and draws connections between the two.

Debra Bustin’s bright and potent ‘Untitled installation’ from 1984 was a surprise, and the gallery’s useful work in making their exhibition archive available online made it easy to watch a 1986 interview from Bustin working on a similar installation. “…that is something that motivates me to make the worlds that I make,” Bustin says, “…I want to make people feel the way the world is wholly around them and how deep it goes in all directions”. Like Parr’s ‘Flukeprint’, Bustin’s work points to the natural world beyond our experience.

In the upstairs galleries alongside At Thresholds, is Triple Feature, an exhibition of three video works by American artist Josh Azzarella. If the works in At Thresholds are interested in repositioning humans in the images we create of our world, Azzarella takes this one step further and removes the people from iconic films. We see Michael Jackson’s music video, Thriller, Nosferatu by FW Murnau and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey–all emptied of people, so that the background becomes foreground. In 2001, the glowing red eye of HAL looks out hopefully for humans to control, but no one’s there, and the effect is disconcerting as the scenes are in equal measure strange and familiar. The camera feels like it is hunting for a subject–any kind of useful body to generate meaning, narrative and action.

Azzarella’s process in making these works is astounding. Frame by frame, he erased the people, and edited in a consistent background. So, what’s he up to here? Again, it seems to be about limits and thresholds. In Triple Feature, it’s the limits of the image and the point at which our memory steps in to plug the gaps or make up something totally new. What can we remember of MJ’s Thriller when watching the blank canvas of its background? What triggers the memory of a particular costume, song lyric or dance move? How much is in our heads, dictated by our cultural consumption, and how much is in the image?

Like much of the work in At Thresholds, Azzarella prevents people from being the centre of meaning or narrative. Can we generate entirely new spaces, these exhibitions ask, when humans step out of the frame?