Lisa Reihana (Artist research)
Artist research:
Name: Lisa Reihana
Where are they from and where are they now:
Lisa Reihana is a New Zealand artist of Maori descent who grew up in Blockhouse Bay, Auckland, New Zealand.
born in 1964.
Went to Elam.
“As an urban Maori with an English mother and a Maori father, she was drawn into the debate about the colonial experience.”
“I call myself a Maori artist because I am Maori, even if I am not a speaker. My father came to Auckland to make money and send it home to the north, which was a very Maori thing to do, but he was of a generation where he got the cane every morning he went to school for speaking Maori.”
"Theories on Maori art were expanding, but I was training in a Western art school. Michael Parekowhai and Shane Cotton and Peter Robinson were a year behind so we were a generation of young Maori being trained in a Western art context."
Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine and Ngāi Tū descent,
Art work (for each relevant piece):
Name of work: Pursuit of Venus: Infected
What is it, and what is it made of:
It is a digital film installation portraying Pacifica 200 years ago,
32 minutes long,
Across a 26metre (4 metre high) screen canvas.
Made by filming performers in these traditional costumes doing dances and performing the everyday life,
Filmed it on a green screen and it was all put together in one long strip.
Show the cultural identity and colonisation – encounters with Europeans.
Infection: once you have seen something, you are changed forever.
“In 1804, Joseph Dufour created Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, a sophisticated 20-panel scenic wallpaper whose exotic subject matter referenced popular illustrations of the times and mirrored a widespread fascination with Captain Cook and de la Perouse Pacific voyages. Two hundred years later Lisa Reihana reanimates this popular wallpaper as a panoramic video spanning a width of 26 metres.”
“While Dufour's work models Enlightenment beliefs of harmony amidst mankind, Reihana's version includes encounters between Polynesians and Europeans which acknowledge the nuances and complexities of cultural identities and colonisation.”
“The cast and crew have expanded to include Cook, [Joseph] Banks and [Tahitian chief and translator] Tupaia."
That's the infection. "I still use the wallpaper as a backdrop because that is what inspired the project."
She says colonisation is a huge project to look at. "This is the opening, that moment when it first started to happen, we were all travelling about, we were so interested in each other. I got interested in Joseph Banks because he was operating the trading table, he was a linguist, he had wide and varied interests, so I wanted to show him doing some trading, talking to people, and then getting involved with the chief mourner in Tahiti, haunting villages. I wanted to restage that moment because I think of it as the first instance of an Englishman blacking up”
6 years to make.
“repopulates Dufour’s fantastical exotic landscape with encounters between peoples of the South Pasific and early colonial explorers. The result is compelling, not simply for its high pixel count and unusual hybrid of animation and film, but for its delicate portrayal of the wonderment and violence of cross – cultural interactions.”
Said of the previous wallpaper; “there are all these gorgeous exotic peoples in the wallpaper, but they’re quite neo-classical. I could see that it was attempting to make references to wrapped tapa bodies, but it just didn’t look anything like the pacific. Dufour presented a utopian Tahitian landscape. It is ‘nowhere’.”
“A 32-minute film moves slowly, elegantly as panorama across a twenty five-metre long wall. The work takes as its starting point Frenchman Jean Gabriel Charvet’s 1804 scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages De La Mer Pacifique, an Enlightenment inspired neoclassical utopian vision of the peoples of the Pacific (a small section of which can be seen elsewhere in the gallery).”
Image:
in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (still), 2015 Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki gift of the Patrons of Auckland Art Gallery, 2014
What does it mean/represent:
Lisa “reclaiming our stories and making us more real again, talking about the past, talking about now, and thinking about ourselves in the future”.
She is portraying the past as it was, not over dramatising it in anyway.
It is a way for everyone to understand the story – relies on her story telling abilities.
Connection to culture:
Perform the dances,
wearing the regalia
having people from that culture (even though she used many different Pacifica people, Samoan, Tahiti, Hawaii)
Connection to collonialism:
depicts an encounter with Europeans
literally tells the story of the first encounter with all the appropriate people there and actions.
Critique/response to artwork:
“sense of performance, people and place,” (enjoying it – not confronting at all) decide if I want to be confrontational or not.) performance work.
“A sense of reclaiming identity and that’s really empowering”
“taking back the power to imagine and represent the pacific”
Audiences love the fact that it is storytelling.
“In Pursuit of Venus (Infected) is the latest attempt by Reihana to contest New Zealand's colonial history.”
“Mark Amery finds Lisa Reihana’s major work a rare combination of the complex and accessible.” “Forget the unnecessarily clever, fiddly parenthesis in the title, Reihana’s spectacle of the encounters of the peoples of the Pacific with Captain Cook’s crews is both accessible and complex in its employment of technology and in its consideration of views of Pacific culture and history. It’s a reminder that some great artworks can meet both popular and fine art acclaim on debut.”
“Reihana’s handling of the narrative is accomplished. Inspired by that enlightenment thinking, there is no didactic drama, rather the slow infection of alcohol, disease, temptation, and cultural misunderstanding leading to a gradual, escalation”
“What I like most about Reihana’s work is that, rather like a family domestic drama that explodes but then dissipates in mood the prevailing feeling is of appreciation and understanding. The work feels grounded in a reaching for peace and connection between communities, Pacific or otherwise, rather than just the telling of a tragic story with a beginning, middle and end.”
“there is a joy in being able to move before the long work, moving in and out of scenes, chasing them along as they slowly unfold, and moving out for a widescreen view. The distinct tableaux are cleverly structured to play out over the minute or so they take to move across the wall.”
“I’m reminded of the large-scale narrative mural work of the Mexican modernists, notably Diego Rivera’s ability to bring together many historical threads and not overly sanitise the tensions. That kind of large-scale storytelling – gutsy, accessible but nuanced - has never completely found its own voice here in New Zealand, until now.”
“Still the risk is that in such broad pick’n’mix strokes Reihana gets seen as simply promulgating the kind of stereotypes of the cultural village that colonial tourism encouraged. As Maori, these are not her cultures. But it’s brave rather than naïve stuff – she is twisting the viewpoint from a Pacific perspective. We are on the land behind the people, looking out.”
Artist further work/development:
"I always try to be on the edge of technology so I can future-proof the work. It's ready to go to an even higher-resolution picture, but we don't have the equipment to present it at that stage yet. From a technical perspective it means a lot of data wrangling, but I am buying time so in 10 years' time it will still look good and have relevance. The wallpaper was also technologically innovative. It took 1000 woodblocks to create this complex and narrative-driven panoramic wallpaper. Whatever you think of the content, it had this quality that made it stand out at the time."
Now she has worked out the technical aspects, Reihana hopes in future to include some of the indigenous peoples excluded from the wallpaper, such as the tribes around Nootka Sound in Alaska where Cook spent time, and Australian Aboriginals.
Supporting artwork: Dandy: “Lisa’s Digital Marae is an ongoing project named with a collective title to reference the spiritual and cultural space called the marae. This 2007 series explores masculinity, power and gender. The work is an investigation of turangawaewae (a place to stand) of creating and experiencing identity, in a virtual space. The artist summarises her approach to digital media and to ideas of identity with this statement.”
“Dandy combines cultural understandings from Māori and European cultures. The image borrows the insignia of a ‘British gentleman’ to evoke ideas of ‘privilege’. Victor makes an impression in his ‘Dandy’ outfit proudly displaying his distinct tā moko.”
·"The New Zealand Project exhibition catalogue is Lisa Reihana’s portrait, Dandy, a work from her Digital Marae series (2001-ongoing). This work features a mid-length portrait of a Maori man in colonial clothing with a full moko (facial tattoo). Reihana’s piece is a reenactment of colonial portraiture photography, a repetition of othering that reworks stereotypical discourse to produce uneasy affects. Presumably this sense of disquiet comes from the unlikely coming together of signs of Western modernity (the finely detailed costuming of a colonial gentleman) and Indigenous tradition (the full moko of a Maori warrior or rangatira).” (Smith, 115)
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW7-zKBQksY
https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/exhibition/in-pursuit-of-venus-infected
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/visual-arts/news/article.cfm?c_id=355&objectid=11442264
https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/lisa-reihana/
https://www.thebigidea.nz/news/columns/mark-amery-visual-arts/2015/jun/165998-outlasting-the-gee-whizz-factor
http://eyecontactsite.com/2015/05/reihanas-infected-pursuit-of-venus
http://www.inpursuitofvenus.com/
https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/17369/dandy
http://www.circuit.org.nz/blog/circuit-cast-episode-23-an-interview-with-lisa-reihana
What I have learnt:
She is stating fact, not opinion
She deals with colonialism by depicting it through storytelling
she doesn't try to merge the cultures, she depicts them in their differences
showing rather than representing
use of something (the wall paper) that was created by a white man that wrongfully depicted the scene so she reused it to rightfully depict it - like setting something right that was wrong.
