Thursday, December 09, 2004
Moving image in Mäori visual art
Students of the Mäori Visual Art programme are benefiting from the guidance of tutor Rachel Rakena, who, new to the Mäori Visual Arts programme in Te Pütahi-ä-Toi, has brought with her a passion for digital art and the moving image.
Ms Rakena was captured by computer art as an arts student in one of the very first classes offered in New Zealand, and she shares this passion with the first young artists in the course to chose the discipline as a creative focus.
Her students were given a project brief of He Hihi Hiko Hikoi, with the notion of hikoi, and of movement and time. Their final work was exhibited in an end-of-year show, in a dark room bright with the light of projected images, film, and sound.
Rewiti Arapere took a projector and a passion for grafitti bombing to public spaces in Palmerston North. In the night, with help from friends, he projected his images onto bus shelters, skate-park walls and the side of a train. The transient images, for the time they were there, realised his ambition to put more Mäori language out there. He filmed the animated process of the bombing, starting with an outline which then filled and was layered in colours, for a documentary shown at the exhibition.