Te Papa is delighted to showcase The Big O.E., by Michael Parekowhai, the latest installation to be displayed in the Sculpture Terrace, Level 6, opening on Saturday 29 April. Newly commissioned by Te Papa for the Sculpture Terrace, an outdoor environment for sculpture on the top floor of the museum, this installation features a 1962 VW Kombi van and trailer set in a painted forest plantation of pinus radiata logs.
Parekowhai is one of New Zealand’s most adventurous and prolific contemporary artists. After many ventures abroad, The Big O.E. is his most recent project for a public museum in New Zealand.
To create this work he has manufactured a ‘New Zealand forest’ and positioned within it a Kombi van and trailer. The Kombi is a vehicle symbolic of travel and the Overseas Experience itself. This particular van is painted with a colour resembling Air New Zealand teal green, which that spills out into the surrounding synthetic forest. However, this forest scene itself is hardly idyllic. The trees – stripped bare and set at exact intervals – resemble the logs of New Zealand’s exotic forest industry!
The Big O.E. also reflects the errors in translation that occur when importing and exporting both culture and nature. A man on the west coast of the South Island might be sold a Volkswagen vehicle on the basis of ideals posed by European advertisements, picturing a family in a very different pine forests. This installation is broadly evocative of the different life such a vehicle and its owner might take given different environmental and social conditions.
Contemporary Art Curator, Natasha Conland says: “Parekowhai disorientates the viewer reminding us of what is native to our own culture and country, and the generalised ideas of identity rooted in the New Zealand popular culture”.
There is a clever trick in Parekowhai’s work that doubly intrigues the viewer, and has to do with the materiality of the objects he works with. The installation has a finish that dazzles! The logs surpass nature through their immaculate production, and equally the Kombi van, although honoured for its real and documented history, has been restored so that it has twice the sheen of any other working vehicle.
Michael Parekowhai, (b.1968, Nga-Ariki, Te Aitanga-A-Mahaki, Rongowhakata) is one of New Zealand’s most regarded contemporary artists, exhibiting regularly throughout New Zealand and the Asia Pacific region over the last ten years, his solo exhibition Patriot: Ten Guitars toured internationally in 2001, and in 2004 his work featured prominently in the exhibition Paradise Now? at the Asia Society, New York.
ENDS
The Big O.E. 2006, by Michael Parekowhai.
Opening 29 April 2006.
Sculpture Terrace, Level 6.
Free entry.
Contact
Bridget MacDonald, Manager Communications, 029 601 0180, 04 381 7083, bridgetm@tepapa.govt.nz