Te Hīkoi Toi: Taking Humans Out of the Picture

‘See it for yourself’ encourages City Gallery Wellington’s current marketing campaign, through banners, posters and online advertisements. A post-pandemic call to action: take your body out to galleries and museums, for in-person experiences. But how do we feel about it? Unstable, at best, after this winter of continuous disease and war in Europe, and unprecedented temperatures and rain.

Ironically, given the marketing angle, the Gallery’s two new exhibitions deal with what we cannot 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 exhibition curated by Moya Lawson, questions the relationship between humans and nature. What does nature hide? How do we show care and behave collectively with the many species with which we share the planet? The show is less of a 1970s lesson in what nature can teach us clumsy humans, more of a nuanced exploration of what nature rightly holds back and how it operates as a political agent in its own right.

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Emily Parr’s photography “Flukeprint” (2021) is an entry point; it is printed on the large banner in the living room and faces you when you first enter the gallery. We see an ocean where a patch in the middle is noticeably smoother than the choppy waves surrounding it. As the title of the work suggests, it is the stain left by a diving paikea (humpback whale), as its lucky stroke smacks and falls back into the sea. We cannot follow the whale and we can no longer see it. The photo records that moment of disappearance, when the natural world reaches out, deeper and further than we can hope to follow.

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

At Thresholds is comprehensive and varied; it includes works in many different media and artists of all generations and ethnic identities. It does what great group shows do: share the work of artists you already know, surprise you with others, and make connections between the two.

Debra Bustin’s brilliant and powerful “untitled installation” from 1984 came as a surprise, and the gallery’s helpful work in making their exhibition archive available online made it easy to watch a 1986 interview of Bustin working on a similar facility. “…it’s something that motivates me to create the worlds that I create,” says Bustin, “…I want people to feel how the world is all around them and how big it is. going 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 of At Thresholds are concerned with the repositioning of humans in the images we create of our world, Azzarella goes even further and takes people away from iconic films. We see the music video for Michael Jackson, Thriller, FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, all emptied of people, so the background becomes the foreground. In 2001, HAL’s glowing eye hopefully seeks to be controlled by humans, but no one is there, and the effect is unnerving as the scenes are both eerie and familiar. The camera feels like it’s chasing a subject – any type of body useful for generating meaning, storytelling, and action.

Azzarella’s process in making these works is astounding. Frame by frame, he erased the characters, and mounted in a coherent background. So what is he doing here? Again, it seems to be limits and thresholds. In Triple Feature, it is the limits of the image and the moment when our memory intervenes to fill in the gaps or invent something totally new. What can be learned from MJ’s Thriller by looking at the blank canvas of its background? What triggers the memory of a particular costume, song, or dance move? How much is in our heads, dictated by our cultural consumption, and how much is in the picture?

Like much of the work in At Thresholds, Azzarella keeps people from being the focus of meaning or narrative. Can we generate entirely new spaces, these exhibits ask, when humans step outside the frame?

• At Thresholds and Triple Feature, City Gallery Wellington, through December 4.