BRIT BUNKLEY, EDDIE CLEMENS, PETER MADDEN, BEN PEARCE, DAVID RYAN, PETER TREVELYAN, RONNIE VAN HOUT
19 November 2011 - 6 February 2012
DIONOIA: A Diorama of Paranoia is an exhibition that marks the final year of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. This calendar was observed by the Mayan civilisation and accounts for a 5,125 year-long cycle that ends on 21 December 2012. This ‘end date’ has been a controversial and much debated subject within academia, popular culture and new ageism. It is also one example of the many eschatological beliefs – that is, the end of the world as we know it – to be found in cultures and histories throughout the world.
This exhibition entertains the prophecies and doomsday theories associated with this event. It features art works by seven male artists who work in three dimensions: sculpture, installation and animation. These works reference fallen empires, megalomanic regimes, disasters – natural and man-made – and apocalyptic narratives in television and film , from the nuclear power plant in the cartoon sitcom The Simpsons to the time travel machine war epic, Terminator 2.
As a group exhibition, it is a constructed environment thick with anxiety and paranoia. While there is a sense of foreboding in each work, these concerns are latent rather than explicitly expressed. In many cases, the threat is not immediately apparent but may be sensed either in the meticulous (verging on obsessive) construction of the works, the fragility of the material or the suggested narrative of the subject – that is, what might be or may become…
This exhibition might also be regarded as a survey of emerging and established sculptural practice in New Zealand by male artists. The concept of a gender-based exhibition was a fashionable concept in the 1980s and previously the preserve of women artists. In some respects, this exhibition plays on this tradition and suggests that apocalyptic paranoia may be a male concern in contrast to the fecund stereotypes of feminist art practice.
Anna-Marie White
The Suter curator