Ascension

Ascension is a new work by leading conceptual artist Michael Parekowhai. Made by him for Toi Tu Toi Ora, the biggest exhibition of contemporary Māori art to be held at Toi o Tamaki, Auckland Art Gallery, it sat alongside Te Ao Hurihuri his installation consisting of two upside down large scale white elephants. Like Te Ao Hurihuri, Ascension is an installation that explores notions related to movement, transition and time. Made up of four small Magritte-style sculptural figures that float down the wall in an ascending manner, Parekowhai says the work is about ‘becoming’. The configuration of Ascension relates to Poutama, a tukutuku pattern in meeting houses, with Poutama symbolic of ‘the ascension to the next level of consciousness’.

Parekowhai’s ‘every man’, the seemingly identical figures drawn from Rene Magritte’s 1953 painting Golconda, civil servants dressed in double-breasted coats, bowler hats with an umbrella and a briefcase, are in this work painted pounamu green. The pounamu colour of the figures reinforces the transition between the sculptures being a solid object - a piece of stone - and a human form, with the top figure fully pounamu and the lower figures in descending fashion, half pounamu or less.

The Magritte-style figure used in Ascension the expression of routine and habit are a repeated form in Parekowhai’s sculptural repertoire and have appeared in two other major installations by him. His Magritte-style figures make up Rainbow Servant Dreaming, first shown at Roslyn Oxley Gallery in Sydney in 2005 and again in Somewhere over the Rainbow, 2015 made and included in Parekowhai’s survey show, The Promised Land held at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane in 2015. Somewhere over the Rainbow, 2015 was shown later that year in New Zealand in his solo show - Rules of the Game - held at Michael Lett Gallery, in Auckland.

Parekowhai says all his Magritte-style figure works are related with Ascension the most recent work. His two earlier installations feature multiple figures installed to activate and change space, and like Magritte’s Golconda painting, to shift perception.

‘Golconda depicts a scene of nearly identical men dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats, who seem to be like drops of heavy rain (or to be floating like helium balloons… The men are spaced in hexagonal grids facing the viewpoint and receding back in grid layers.’

Although there is a literal and obvious relationship in form in Ascension to Magritte’s work with Parekowhai referencing Magritte’s ‘Men in Bowler hats’, that appeared in the Belgian artist’s work frequently from 1926, the more significant connection between the two artists work is a conceptual link. Parekowhai’s work, like much of Margritte’s, operates as a conundrum, a puzzle, an intricate problem that has be thought through to be worked out or at times that is posed, but is impossible to unpack and solve.