Unnerved: An introduction
Michael Parekowhai | New Zealand b.1968 | Kapa Haka (Whero) 2003 | Automotive paint on fibreglass | 188 x 60 x 50cm | Purchased 2009 with funds from Tim Fairfax, AM, through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Queensland Art Gallery | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Maud Page
The last time Michael Parekowhai proposed that two of his gigantic inflatable rabbits be shown together, in Christchurch, there was a torrent of public complaint.1 The horizontal bunny, with one eye closed and a lolling tongue (looking either drunk or dead), was supposed to have been lying in the middle of the historic Cathedral Square, with its seven-metre-high brother peering at it from beside the Anglican cathedral. The argument appeared to centre on what constituted good art, with the work’s more sinister allusions to colonial history sidelined. Whatever the reason, the rabbits — named Cosmo McMurtry and Jim McMurtry — were firmly rejected as suitable emblems in this most symbolic part of the city.
As in Australia, rabbits were introduced by British colonists as early as the 1830s, released for food and sport to create an illusion of home. But with no native predators to limit their spread, rabbit numbers quickly grew to plague proportions in New Zealand, particularly in the South Island.2 The metaphor of something introduced from elsewhere that then multiplies and has a profound effect on the environment is rich for any settler country. Brought together for the first time in Brisbane, the McMurtry brothers lark at the entrance of ‘Unnerved: The New Zealand Project’. Disturbingly Disney-like, they cavort in the gallery space, with Percy Grainger’s cheerful piano tune ‘Country gardens’ in the background, and encapsulate the broad aesthetic and some of the most prevalent thematic concerns in this exhibition.
To be unnerved is to be deprived of ‘courage, strength, determination or confidence’.3 Yet, in contemporary usage, the term also carries subtler undertones. To be unnerved is to be perturbed, to experience disquiet, to be aware that something is not quite right, to feel apprehension to a greater or lesser extent. It is a word that could be linked to an instinctive reaction or to a rational certitude. As a noun, to have ‘nerve’ can mean to have boldness and audacity, as well as to be nervous. Its complexity mirrors this vital bundle of fibres that convey impulses of sensations and motion between the brain and other parts of the body.
Many of the works in ‘Unnerved’ operate on a multi-sensory level, addressing the idea of being unnerved in a purely physical way, propelling vertiginous experience such as Michael Parekowhai’s The Horn of Africa 2006, where a fibreglass seal balances a concert grand piano perilously on its nose. Equally visceral is Alex Monteith’s moving-image work Composition for Royal New Zealand Air Force Red Checkers 2009, which follows the flight path of five aerobatic planes as they pirouette through the New Zealand skies. We feel James Oram’s pain as he holds his breath until the struck match burns his fingers in his cinematic work Feeling the burn 2006. Sometimes, too, it is the quietness of a work, such as Ruth Watson’s salt installation Au hasard 2010, that conjures its antonym of disquiet. Meandering across the gallery floor, Watson’s delicate and ephemeral work nevertheless calls on the associations of salt and wounds, of the bitterness of this life necessity and of its tumultuous trade history. [next page]
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