Te Hīkoi Toi: Art and possession

Art and property have long been entwined. When we privately possess an art object, with that comes the sense we have some kind of ownership share in its story. It becomes ours to relate. A little creepy, when you think about it.

With historical portraiture this can feel almost like a kind of cultural slavery – the image of a person and its stories in the service of those with the power to hold it. With late 19th and early 20th century studio portraiture, Māori were ultimately collected, and treated like a ‘dying race’, placed behind glass.

It’s no wonder then that many contemporary artists continue to answer colonisation by revisiting the portrait as a way of reclaiming power. They replace stiff grandeur with a lighter more fluid current sense of being.

READ MORE:
* Te Papa – 25 years at Our Place
* Te Hīkoi Toi: Portraying Pōneke in Portraiture
* In praise of the dark art – the publicists

In leafy lower Victoria St, Jhana Millers Gallery represents a new generation of artists. Some like Christopher Ulutupu, Claudia Kogashi and Ayesha Green fit this description well. Add Matt Tini to the list.

This is Tini’s first dealer show after graduating from Massey last year with a Masters in Fine Art. Strongly but quietly asserting a Māori urban queer identity, Tini responds to historical portraiture. Re-coding the native features two series of work, that promise much to come in their softness and gentleness of approach. Rare qualities reminiscent of the work of Shannon Te Ao.

Most powerful is diptych ‘Sitters 2’, a black and white print gleaming on aluminium. The sitter is in formal portrait pose, yet the camera zooms in on their hands and lap, identity absent. From their dress time period and gender are fluid, but in the left-hand image they hold kawakawa leaves and headphones, in the right fern leaves and the sleek chip of a mobile phone. Blink and these could be rosary beads and mere.

Tini plays exquisitely with light, and there’s real sculptural energy in this work in the clenched hands. Strong wrinkled knuckles shine, their animation through light as gently haunting as a nest of ruru. They speak of determination and patience; endless waiting.

For me, the other works in this ‘sitters’ series don’t have the same presence, yet there’s fledgling strength in the way their subjects own their own image. The viewer is likely to disappear into the velvet black of a sitter’s jersey, before feeling any sense of possession.

The ‘Untitled Nude’ series was produced during Covid lockdown in the backroom of Tini’s parents’ house. A makeshift studio hooked up with sheets in which to take self-portraits on a bed, Tini mimics the compositions of famous classical paintings by Ingre, Velázquez and Boucher.

In an approach familiar from the work of artist Yuki Kihara, Tini counters the orientalist fetishistion by Europe of the ‘other’ in the form of naked women. Yet while lying on his front across the bed, legs splayed, sheets artfully arranged as classic still life drapery, Tini is all the same fully clothed, in clean jeans, long white socks and t-shirt. Tini quietly, firmly takes back the gaze, something assisted by the casual, provisional nature of the setup. Tini’s work is elegant yet makeshift, ‘classical casual’ could be the style. Glimpses of a wardrobe, a blanket or string of fairy lights break the formality.

The purity of the way we represent people is questioned. There’s power in the play of light on clean white shirts and sheets, gently questioning the cultural cleansing that goes on in commercial photography.

Elsewhere – in all of our homes – there are smaller, more personal and whimsical objects with stories attached.

Rather than big paintings and photographs, Erica Van Zon’s wee mixed media works remind me of the souvenirs, family craft projects and beloved ornaments on the sills and shelves of homes. Things valued not for being on trend or expensive, but for their particular familial stories or sheer quirkiness.

Employing beautiful embroidery, fitted with panes of textured glass, as if looking through an old suburban window, Van Zon’s work also subvert commercial sales imagery. Each work has the fruity zest of brightening our lives with bric-a-brac and colour. Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary she pushes arrangements of colour, form and texture in brave new ways, to make us consider what is around us every day. Life, Van Zon reminds us, is always slightly weird and funny. Homely but unerringly strange

Like wee object poems, each work is an experiment in storytelling form. Glass beads depict the Sixbar Wrasse, ‘the most beautiful fish’ encountered on the Great Barrier Reef. Another work presents a view of seagulls on a shade cloth, as seen above you, in Island Bay’s Shorland’s Park. An exotic jungle in thread is Van Zon’s backyard, while a bottle of Advocaat is playfully paired with an avocado, housed behind ‘Cotswold texture glass’.

Wonder is found by cocking your head, taking your time and looking at the world at hand differently.

• Matt Tini and Erica Van Zon, Jhana Millers Gallery, Pōneke, until March 11.

Must see this weekend

This year, remarkable live art performance event Performance Arcade has imaginatively migrated around the waterfront’s Whairepo Lagoon and Wharewaka. Peppering shipping containers and other structures where you might not expect, in its exercise of experimental performance design the festival boldly tests out new uses of public space – even including a ‘floating theatre’. Multiple performances and events are happening until Sunday evening.