Saturday, October 30, 2010

Unnerved: The New Zealand Project at the NGV


Curated by Maud Page, Unnerved: The New Zealand Project closed recently at GoMA, Brisbane and will open at the National Gallery of Victoria on 25 November 2010. 

Unnerved includes Gavin Hipkins' The Homely, which has been described as a post-colonial gothic novel. Through a cinematic run of 80 images, which are often slightly blurry and filled with the colours of a dreamscape, Hipkins re-presents monuments and memorials of Australia and New Zealand nationalism with fragmented glimpses of domestic interiors and museum dioramas. He also says: "Although New Zealand has an international reputation for being clean, green and beautiful (a mythology that New Zealanders often call on to represent ourselves) it is the treatment and conquest of nature as an adventure playground that interests me with this project". 
Images: Gavin Hipkins' The Homely (1997-2000), installation view at Brisbane's GoMA in the exhibition Unnerved: The New Zealand Project. Photograph by Natasha Harth