Exhibition Opening
mossman.galleryTe Whiti o Rongomai’s whakatauākī goes, “Ko te pō te kaihari i te rā. Ko te mate te kaihari i te oranga.”
The night is the bringer of the day. Death is the bringer of life. (1)
Mossman is pleased to present Mā te wā, a solo exhibition of new work by Shannon Te Ao, opening Saturday 12 September from 2-4pm. All welcome.
Working predominantly with performance and film, Te Ao’s elegiac installations explore fraught dynamics of indigeneity, language, and loss. Richly layered, Te Ao’s works enact a compression wherein past and present co-exist, and daily life is permeated with multifarious social, political, cultural, and philosophical histories. The photographs in Mā te wā take their starting point from the artist's own oeuvre, using footage from his archive as filmic backdrops. Te Ao situates the body in a state of flux, set in relation to personal narratives of loss, grief, love, identity, and his own processes of de-colonisation.
When I was very young, my older siblings told me of a spider that lived in the gully of a bend on the Desert Road. A giant spider, “Can you see it?” “Where?! Where?!” “Oh. You missed it.”
For years I strained to see the gully-dwelling giant, leaning so far into the window I thought our van would tip. I never did see it. I still look for the spider, though I know I’ll never find it. (1)
The works in this exhibition share the genealogy of Te Ao’s most recent film Ka mua, ka muri, particularly their process of compression and expansion. These photographs similarly compress the body between a moving image space and the slow shutter speed and extended filmic exposure. This tangible amalgamation of light and space materially affects the dynamic body.
The resulting photographs document a process of transition or transformation from one state to another. They are richly layered portraits that transcend specific circumstances to speak to wider histories and unfixed meanings. Mā te wā - see you later, time will tell.
Te Whiti o Rongomai’s whakatauākī goes, “Ko te pō te kaihari i te rā. Ko te mate te kaihari i te oranga.”
The night is the bringer of the day. Death is the bringer of life. (1)
Mossman is pleased to present Mā te wā, a solo exhibition of new work by Shannon Te Ao, opening Saturday 12 September from 2-4pm. All welcome.
Working predominantly with performance and film, Te Ao’s elegiac installations explore fraught dynamics of indigeneity, language, and loss. Richly layered, Te Ao’s works enact a compression wherein past and present co-exist, and daily life is permeated with multifarious social, political, cultural, and philosophical histories. The photographs in Mā te wā take their starting point from the artist's own oeuvre, using footage from his archive as filmic backdrops. Te Ao situates the body in a state of flux, set in relation to personal narratives of loss, grief, love, identity, and his own processes of de-colonisation.
When I was very young, my older siblings told me of a spider that lived in the gully of a bend on the Desert Road. A giant spider, “Can you see it?” “Where?! Where?!” “Oh. You missed it.”
For years I strained to see the gully-dwelling giant, leaning so far into the window I thought our van would tip. I never did see it. I still look for the spider, though I know I’ll never find it. (1)
The works in this exhibition share the genealogy of Te Ao’s most recent film Ka mua, ka muri, particularly their process of compression and expansion. These photographs similarly compress the body between a moving image space and the slow shutter speed and extended filmic exposure. This tangible amalgamation of light and space materially affects the dynamic body.
The resulting photographs document a process of transition or transformation from one state to another. They are richly layered portraits that transcend specific circumstances to speak to wider histories and unfixed meanings. Mā te wā - see you later, time will tell.
