MOVEMENT AND CONNECTION
As a South Auckland based curator interested primarily in contemporary Pacific artists, an Australian photographer called Rebecca Ann Hobbs crossing my path in Otara, the heart of Polynesian New Zealand, has been a rare and intriguing occurrence.
Since 2008, Hobbs has been working as a lecturer at Manukau School of Visual Arts, an institution located in suburban South Auckland. The practical and theoretical visual arts education within the socio-political context of working class, predominantly Polynesian suburbia is geographically and academically dislocated from the wider art world. Delivering, teaching and discussing visual arts and appreciation is based on people and pictures, books and the internet. In a relative gallery desert, art hype can be transparent and context becomes vital; meaning and mana is central.
In researching this article, I came across a new form of insight to Hobbs’s work: student contextual responses documented in personal blogs. I’m drawn to them because they are like virgin artistic readings from fresh minds; discourse based less on institutional and/or academic rendering, more on lived experience and unedited thoughts. One such response noted that Hobbs’s photography doesn’t ‘make the viewer feel abstract’.1 In opposition to the published texts around Hobbs’s work, about absurdity and the human condition, I like the honesty of the blog and the public/private interface. It is raw and self-published, democratic and empowered.
I have experienced Hobbs’s work in both traditional and non-traditional art contexts, and the formation of my relationship with her imagery and position has been at times cautious. There are few artists whose work can translate from the institution to the grassroots with little lost in translation. I find myself drawn to Hobbs’s video works for their ‘made... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Opening celebrations at Fresh Gallery, Otara, 2011. Courtesy the artist.
Smash, 2003. Lightjet print, 50 x 50cm. Courtesy the artist.
