Mean time exposure

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

The phrase ‘in the meantime’ refers to an ambiguous suspension of time, where you are waiting for something to happen or something to end. A common enough phrase, but a concept that starts to feel weirdly oblique if you think too much about it. Brent Wong’s Mean time exposure has this same eerie feeling, where the passage of time slips and slides between past and future. Here, the ruins of some futuristic structure erode into the ancient landscape while a phantom version is resurrected in the clouds. The geometric form hovers above the hills as if emerging from the imagination of some unseen architect. What has happened here? What will happen next?

Wong’s enigmatic dreamscapes do not depict any real place, but stitch together general characteristics from the environments around him. Born in Ōtaki in 1945, Wong moved to Wellington as a young boy and grew up on Vivian Street. The clear, crisp skies and treeless hillsides in his paintings are reminiscent of the landscapes surrounding Wellington and the southern Wairarapa, but are dotted with the dilapidated Victorian villas and architectural elements of the inner city. In this work in particular, the geometric forms seem vaguely reminiscent of Ian Athfield’s quirkily eclectic architectural designs.
Wong’s structures, however, are often in ruin. Mean time exposure was painted during the early 1970s, when Wellington began an aggressive period of demolition to rid the city of older buildings deemed vulnerable to earthquakes. This sense of latent danger and urban destruction seems to have permeated the subconscious of the young artist. His paintings, devoid of people, give a sense of mild dystopia under the cheerful blue skies.

From the time they were first exhibited in the late 1960s, Wong’s hard-edged surrealist paintings captured the public imagination. Though largely self-taught, he quickly became an important figure in the New Zealand painting scene, recognised for his technical mastery of the medium. In works like Mean time exposure, he uses this hyper-realistic style to create an extraordinary version of the local landscape, adding phantasmal elements that make it both more magnificent and more unsettling than the real thing.

Chelsea Nichols