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Writing

Across the face of the moon

Across the face of the moon is a a developing series of pictorial and text based works, based in a writing and digital drawing/painting/animation practice. This is the written component.
This text, consists of notes that are currently being developed.

"I look up to the moon, and I say inside myself “I used to be afraid of you”. Now I see your beauty up there. I feel your light carry my eyes across the stars. You’re directing me home. And I know that beauty exists, if not here then somewhere. I see a tinge of black across the curve of your brow. You’re not full tonight. I see you’re in profile, turned, looking like you’re talking to a neighbouring star. I hear you whispering. “These words have collapsed the distance between us.” I hear you calling. One soft karanga call landing on empty air. “From here, I watch the earth. Do you watch it too? Or do you have better worlds to gaze on with wonder?”. Maybe in a few million years I’ll be still here to hear that star answer back. Somewhere still standing with you, you still there above and roaring. Well above, at the apex of all things, seeing our flaming sun dim above a dying world. I hope the answer will be “yes, yes I do”."
Across the face of the moon

Developments

Across the face of the moon.

Across the face of the moon is a a developing series of pictorial and text based works, based in a writing and digital drawing/painting/animation practice.

"A high whine of air brakes – pick up/drop off. Step on board, with jarring, shifting plate’s tremorring beneath. Each shake resounds as a spectre of Napier’s 1931 earthquake. You know the driver from the night before. He knows you grew up in a city, built on the rubble of the new world, built on the bodies of the old world. Everyone’s worried that this city might fall again. We’ll either be destroyed or all remade – all the same in contemporary artifice. Some won’t be getting back up. Some won’t even be looking at what their looking at, long enough to even notice. After each jolt, we either fall back or get back into place. Do we sleep soundly, in each shift of flashing black segue-way? Try looking out the window. We’re moving just fast enough to see that the world is there, then the world is gone. The world is there and gone again."
Across the face of the moon.

Writing

Notes on Colour

Putting together notes on colour was writing a text that – for me – folded time. Parts were written a long time ago from 1999 to the time just before it was published in 2019. 20 years of scribbled and typed texts that lingered in my head. There was so much left out of this text, but there may be other texts.

"The camera can’t capture it, but eyes see panorama as well as the macro. Red, white and grey. Whiter, softer plumes of clouds look like they’re drifting from smokestacks. Colour can’t capture it all either, this street is sound. The sky as a chamber. With the ever-nearing urgency of a passing car, I hear your foot on the gas and your need to get home."
Notes on Colour

Exhibition

Kapua

Kapua was a video and animated work developed while studying at MIT, Auckland in 2007. The work edited together a selection of videos derived mostly from a Whānau reunion in 1991. Placing these alongside 3D animations.

"Inside the Whare Iri-Te-Kura there’s a perspex box on a central pou that contains a New Zealand Film and Television award that was given to the film “Ngāti” in 1988. It’s an odd coalescence when the virtual is returned to the real in order to acknowledge the role it played in its conception. Filming for “Ngāti” took place in and around Waipiro Bay using significant sites from the area as its base. The films narrative developed to offer a way of tying together the discourse of urban drift and its pressures on communities. I get a sense that the intent was to develop a somewhat idealized space, a purely virtual space at that, which would operate to anchor Maori. By talking of a time when Maori were in the process of contending with the implications of moving away from rural lifestyles and subsistence economies that existed on the peripheries of nation to become more central within the functionality of a capitalist economy."
Kapua

Exhibition

Self-Portrait @ East 2018

Self-portrait, 2018 Digital print.

This confronting self-portrait by artist Rangituhia Hollis is a new work created for EAST 2018 that alludes to how life challenges such as economic precariousness can render us physically and emotionally distressed. Hollis’s work also connects to a larger conversation of creative struggle by drawing on the emotive qualities of artists throughout history, such as the dramatic lighting and high contrasting colours reminiscent of paintings by Michelangelo Merisi do Caravaggio, and the physical and psychological despair depicted in many works by artists such os Francisco Goya or Francis Bacon. The brutal yet surgical incisions could be further likened to the site-specific work of sculptor Gordon Motto-Clark who was known for cutting buildings in half Referencing art history through contemporary media the work also draws into question the technical shift in creative practice from analogue methods to the computer aided tools used by Hollis.

My Father doesn’t ever want to see this work again. It wasn’t until I showed it to him that I realised the wider scope of the work. When I made it, I guess I made it in a bubble. I didn’t think about how it might be perceived by anyone else, rather I made it absorbed inside the frame. I didn’t think further than that.
Self-Portrait @ East 2018