ALEX MONTEITH
Alex Monteith’s work combines the formal and the relational, engaging with communities of practice and creating events engineered for the camera. Ranging from sheep-dog trialing, to motorbike racing to surfing, Monteith is video artist as participant-observer. Immigrating to New Zealand from Northern Ireland as a nine-year old, a number of her works have explored the divisions of her place of origin. The feature-length experimental documentary, Chapter and Verse (2005), shot largely in 16mm, allusively explored the history of the Troubles, combining interviews with known figures such as Ian Paisley with more poetic examinations of sites of longstanding violent conflict in locations such as Derry and County Tyrone. The mapping project Traditional Route (2004) used still photography and video to trace the overlapping fields of view of the surveillance cameras of (the then) Royal Ulster Constabulary Stations in inner Belfast.
The artist’s immigrant eye gives her an acute sense for local conditions, the communities they shape and are in turn shaped by. Monteith’s continuing interest in the politics of location and the displacements and violence of colonisation are evident in works documenting events such as a Maori sovereignty protest, 1020 meters in 26 minutes Waitangi Day Auckland Harbour Bridge Protest (2008) or the two-screen Re-enactment of the Return of the Maori Battalion C Company Nga Tama Toa (2008). These works document participation in the specific events, adding to the record of them, but also abstracting them. Part of the re-enactment of the 1946 return to Gisborne of the renowned battalion, after years of fierce fighting and the loss of many soldiers, the parade recorded by Monteith’s cameras was an orchestrated spectacle of historical memory, of joy and loss, sorrow and remembrance... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Chapter and Verse, 2005. 16mm film-frame. CCTV mast, ’Derry, Co Derry, 16th December 2003.
Chapter and Verse, 2005. 16mm film-frame. Riot, Melmount Rd, Strabane, Co Tyrone, 11 July 2001
