Installation at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland, 2014
The Showroom: a black comedy in pastels
In 2008 The Museum of City and Sea, Wellington, faithfully recreated Hitchings' original gallery. The Showroom is my version.
The Showroom: a black comedy in pastels
Helen Hitchings was a 1940/50s modernist gallery dealer in Wellington who showed both NZ fine and applied art, providing a kind of visual instruction manual for post-war art and style.
The items of The Showroom are familiar but not familiar, as each item is made according to the specifications of my art practice. While each item may have a semblance of 'artness', 'chairness' or 'tableness', they have no obligation to fulfil the ordinary function of art, chair or table. They are more about a sense of the ridiculous and a parody of style and control. Hitchings integrated the emerging person of style in the late 40s with their accompanying environment. But in my room of the 2010s, the objects are odd, clumsy and smothered in patterns. The room is a Televistic surround sound, where the objects merge into a noisy screen pattern.
By playing with the aesthetic templates of industrial culture, The Showroom looks at how living has somehow been disenfranchised by lifestyle. The priority of living thing over inanimate thing is shrinking as the economic complex directs us to make, buy, sell and use things, forming our own status as things in the process. You are invited to wear the Feedback Suit and become part of the installation and contribute to the confusion of person, object and environment.
