mike stevenson and steven brower
Genealogy was a collaborative project between Mike Stevenson and Steven Brower, the culmination of a joint residency at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, in May and June 2000.
The genealogy industry is huge these days, with whole sections of public libraries devoted to lineage enthusiasts. Each time I look up an artist on the Internet (Steven Brower, for example) I am just as likely to pull up the family tree of some 18th Century North American land-owner, as the biography of a contemporary artist.
Perhaps genealogy does such good trade in colonial outposts because people feel cut off from their histories. In New Zealand there is a degree of rootless Pakeha angst, experienced in direct contrast to the seamless whakapapa of many Maori, who possess the ability to trace back their ancestry for countless generations. Peter Robinson took this mania for identification with the past to its zenith when he magnified his own racial descent on giant canvases, with the numerical precision of a genetic diagram.
In Genealogy, Stevenson and Brower team up their own art with artworks by their parents. Unlike Robinson's family tree, it is a personal, rather than statistical, gesture, though you could argue that 'white trash roots' have become the latest trendy tribal affiliation (witness Eminem's 'Not straight out of Compton, I'm straight out of trailer', and the ludicrously popular www.geocities.comltrailerpark page). In Genealogy, though, 'parochial' might be closer to the truth than 'trash'. Stevenson and Brower were raised outside of main centres (lnglewood and West Virginia respectively) by parents who had been to art schools and who used their artistic know-how for community or commercially oriented projects. In memoriam to