Text by David Eggleton
Nov 17, 2021
Bridget Reweti delivered a talk to the Whitecliffe MFA and Hons students recently, thus i have come across her as an artist, her work, methodologies and corrosponding ideas. Both Reweti and I work with and within the landscape; themes of land, ways of perceiving, documenting through a lens, as well as alternate methods of capturing imagery is a shared topic and way of making in Bridget Reweti's works as well as mine. But we have different appraches so I'm really interested in looking at her work and ideas in relation to my own thinking, and even apporaching new ideas through observing her works.
Text extracts from Circuit: https://www.circuit.org.nz/blog/bridget-rewetis-illustrated-shards?fbclid=IwAR0A5tB2VQDTSeuLop4v95Cixxm5enHB0qCLMO84oQrHEizEGRGcnpZFTQE
'Kāpukataumāhaka 1', 2021. stereoscopic c-type on photograph. Courtesy of artist.
"Colonial photography has left behind haunted gothic landscapes, but it failed to detect the allegorical and oracular terrains created by Māori."
The exhibition Pōkai Whenua, Pōkai Moana (17 August–30 October 2021) at the Hocken Gallery showed new lens-based work created during Bridget Reweti's time as the Frances Hodgkins Fellow in Ōtepoti.
Katherine Mansfield wrote in her journal in October 1921: 'I've been a camera...I've been a selective camera and it has been my attitude that has determined my selection.' Bridget Reweti's attitude to the conventions of the landscape photography genre in her exhibition Pōkai Whenua, Pōkai Moana (16 August–30 October 2021) spring from her identity as a Māori photographer.
Love the concept of having an attudude, the reason why you make photograohs or artwork, the way you do it and consequently, what you want to get out of it.
Coming to Dunedin to take up the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 2020, she has used the opportunity to weave links between her own explorations of place and those of a traditional ancestor or tipuna, Tamatea. Tamatea was kaiārahi (navigator) of the Takitimu waka that travelled from the fabled place of origin Hawaiki and made landfall at Mauao (Mount Maunganui), close to Reweti's turangawaewae at Tauranga Moana. Tamatea is also part of a legendary narrative that tells how the Takatimu waka travelled along the coast to Te Waewae Bay in the far south of Murihiku, where it is said to have capsized. A small island close to shore is known as Te Puka o Takatimu—or anchorstone of the waka.
Pōkai Whenua, Pōkai Moana is a kind of navigation or re-tracing of traditional journeys that help enshrine and affirm whakapapa, while also acknowledging the mana whenua of Kai Tahu. The exhibition emphasises the collective memory of Bridget Rewiti's iwi. It recuperates submerged history and asserts a primacy of location that precedes the arrival of the Pākehā, the European coloniser. And in her inventive combination of the mechanics of photographic techniques with customary art practices, Reweti's mahi also explores how to live more fully or more harmoniously with the environment in a contemporary context.
‘The plains are nameless and the cities cry for meaning,' wrote Charles Brasch in 1951 in his poem 'The Silent Land', claiming Aotearoa was a blank slate, an empty land. This Eurocentric assertion by Brasch—who as a philanthropist was also responsible for endowing and enabling the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship—exemplifies an estrangement that dominated New Zealand settler culture until the end of the twentieth century.
Reweti's strategy in response is to play around with photographic lenses and framing devices as metaphors for perception in order to indicate just how blinkered and deceptive this particular colonial myth was. She surprises and unsettles the narrative by subverting traditional aesthetic conventions in four separate but juxtaposed sets of works in this show.
[...]
Colonial photography has left behind haunted gothic landscapes, but it failed to detect the allegorical and oracular terrains created by Māori. In her series Summering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri, Reweti follows the trail left by Alfred Burton in his photographic album Wintering on Lakes Te Anau and Manapouri (1889). These photos have descriptive captions inscribed onto the negatives, written in reverse and appearing as white text when the photo was printed. The negative number was included to protect copyright.
All photographs, as Susan Sontag wrote, wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. Taking her photographs at the same spots as Burton did, Reweti has inscribed them with droll, laconic captions that suggest cryptic postcard notations—for example, ‘4951 Not Sure I Took the Lens Cap Off’. Her photos convey today's touristic spirit as slightly jaded and languid. (She travelled into these regions by tourist launch, with others.)
And yet the idea of the scenic view as promulgated by Burton's photography was created as a commercial propostion. He barbered and trimmed his views with handsaw and machete to make them more appealing to Victorian sentiment.
Exactly a theme im exploring through my work, and trying to subvert this commercial, european view onto land.
Reweti's camera acknowledges the strategy of scaling the view down to domestic size fit for adorning a mantelpiece or decorating bourgeois domesticity. But in her hands the camera becomes a chamber for realising hidden or camouflaged potentiality.
YES!!
Reweti reaches down into the sacred earth, the whenua to drag up a patina that resembles mud, silt, the weight of history. She has hand-coloured her photographs with clay and soil pigments taken from around the lakes. The earthiness delicately smeared across the photographs makes each of the 40 images an occluded or mediated view. Her figures become indistinct, shadowy, ghostly.
The two-part 59-minute video installation Like a Rock Against the Tide confirms this obsession with continuity, temporality and with the patterns and rhythms we use to subdivide time. Balancing, weighing and evaluating, Reweti offers a contrast between the smallish imprinted stones and the large moving image projection which might stand in for some vast historic panoramic painting on a two-metre stretch of coarse-grained canvas.
Her video, slightly glitchy or stuttery here and there when I saw it, is an artful tableau which solicits slowed down, trance-like looking. With its view from the base of Mount Maunganui looking out to North Rock Beacon and its flashing warning light, it's a brooding, solemn piece of work. We are keeping vigil along with the camera lens, but little happens: a bird in flight, gusts of wind animate tree branches, the wake of one or two boats. Time itself might be a massive stone weight. But then you notice the video itself begin to compress time, speed it up. Cinema of course sculpts or constructs time: Warhol deals in big slabs; Godard in fragments. Using cinematic techniques, Reweti makes time seem to elongate like bubble-gum, leading into the magic hour of sunset. First in showing us the prolonged view of the seascape at Tauranga Moana, then in the second part at Te Waewae. Then the tide rolls in, ripples wash rapidly ashore, sped up to erase the tyre marks we see left earlier by beach quad bikes.
This is interesting. Cinema, or moving image, rather than adapting to an audience, can instead draw an audience in to the film's own pace, or as the text states, the film's "time." This means that it doesnt have to adhear to the structures of conventional entertainment modes, or ways of filming, but can sit in another context of being itself. It raises other questions to what we encounter in conventional cinema, or 'blockbuster movies' an such other types of media. My video making in the landscape is something i think of as being themselves, in a way that doesn't require editing, post-production, or much re-structuring. Thus they seem absurd and logic-less but exactly in this way i want to be able to provoke a dialogue on the things we might miss otherwise.