Te Hīkoi Toi: shape-shifting exhibitions

This article on The Mermaid Chronicles and Everything at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi was first published in the Dominion Post.

Exhibitions are shape-shifters, they can take many forms. 

Some are like leafing through a coffee table book: glossy images, strong thesis, lots of wall text. Others are a biography: a sustained look at someone’s life and work. Some are autobiography, closely controlled by the artist. But other times a show is only about the art. The artist hidden, watching from the wings. An exhibition can be an argument, with works grouped together on a theme, and a curator whose voice sets up the parameters of the show’s enquiry and makes a case for its importance. 

Then, in the big energy of biennales, exhibitions can be a party; or, in the quiet of a regional museum, you can feel as if you’ve been invited into a friend’s house and they’re showing you their personal collection. Their most special things.

Two new exhibitions at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi test the limits of the exhibition’s form and play with its shape-shifting nature.

The Mermaid Chronicles is part memoir, part group show, part novel, part academic research essay, and part sidewinding Youtube search history. The show is curated by Megan Dunn, who, as a writer, artist and curator, works across the overlapping fields of her interest that duck and dive around each other in this show.

Dunn loves mermaids. She’s loved them since she was ten years old and went to see Splash, the ‘80s mermaid flick with Daryl Hannah. Dunn is interested in what mermaids look like; why people want to be them; how the myth of the mermaid has been re-engineered and reinterpreted across time; and what mermaids might say about our culture, women and our environment more widely.

In this show, Dunn guides us via longer-than-normal wall labels. They are written in her funny, dry style, with its characteristic exclamatory pops and probing questions. She is drawn to mermaid-y media from many sources: show reels and interviews with professional mermaids from Youtube; contemporary video art and sculpture; books from Dunn’s own collection; and archival material. The latter includes the costume of Annette Kellerman, a competitive swimmer and actress who appeared in the 1911 film, The Mermaid. This inquisitive, quick-fire weave of high and low, old and new, public and private, encourages a different way of looking and thinking. It’s one that allows for (and even delights in) the messy contradictions of its subject: how mermaids slip between animal and human; how they represent both feminine power and submission; and how they are encoded as glossy pop culture totems and figures of meaningful cultural significance.

Downstairs at the Adam is a show that also doesn’t fit neatly into a particular category. Everything is a detailed biography that acknowledges the unknowability of its subject; it’s a solo show of work that the late artist Gerald O’Brien didn’t intend anyone to see; and it’s also a eulogy, a measurement of the grief of his nephew, artist Lucien Rizos, who here presents it.

In 2017, O’Brien passed away. He was a longtime resident of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, a Labour Party MP and a businessman. He had also been an inspiring uncle to Rizos. When Rizos began sorting through O’Brien’s home, he discovered a complete world of over 700 painted characters, each with a specific name and history, and other world-building ephemera, like fictional newspapers and maps. Nobody knew about this, not even Fausta, O’Brien’s wife of 60 years.

At the Adam, these unique characters — mainly men, with positions like generals, chancellors and commanders — are lined up in vitrines, facing large format photos, taken by Rizos, of O’Brien’s over-stuffed book shelves. On the far wall, multiple monitors show a flickering slideshow of scanned business cards, photos and newspaper clippings. This is the ephemera of O’Brien’s life and work that Rizos assiduously scanned, one sheet after the other, during the pause of a Covid lockdown, when the world outside was stilled.

Everything is an unsettling show. The presentation of O’Brien’s life and work is a celebration of all he achieved as a politician, city councillor and a caring member of his family. But what would O’Brien make of his fictional world being on display for everyone to see? This is a project that he kept secret for so many years, even from the closest people in his life.

The scanned newspapers and photos appear so quickly, the multiple screens throwing up images asynchronously, that they are hard to read or even focus on. The magazines Rizos created of the scanned material are shut, unreadable, and secured behind a covered plinth. Was this a decision by the curator, Robert Leonard, to stop us from peering too closely into O’Brien’s life?

We might expect an exhibition called Everything to reveal a truth to us. But, in this case, ‘everything’ is too much. The whole of someone, the show suggests, is always beyond what we can know.