michael parekowhai
After a recent alarm over snakes in shipping containers arriving in Aotearoa, last month the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries was looking for scorpions, rumoured to be breeding happily somewhere on a Hawkes Bay vineyard. Since the detection of the honey bee mite Varroa jacobsoni in the North Island, our Minister for Biosecurity has shown up in the news: the unruly globalisation-of-everything, we are reminded, is an issue of security. The bee mite may not look as vividly alien as snakes, here in a country paradisiacally free of poisonous beasties, but it represents a threat to the economy estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Marian Hobbs, current Minister for Biosecurity, is also
New Zealand 's Minister for Broadcasting (including responsibility for TVNZ, Radio NZ and NZ on Air), and is responsible for the National Library and Archives-recognition perhaps, that what is 'native' and what is 'exotic' is just as much an economically entangled issue in 'culture' as it is in 'nature'. Michael Parekowhai achieves the conceptual
charge of his latest show with a deft invocation of the thrashed opposition 'indigenous/introduced', alongside that other battered chestnut, 'natural/cultural '. The snappy installation had an iconic quality, bold, visually neat, well finished and conceptually (a) cute. As ever, Parekowhai's work is visually and spatially graphic, hence photogenic, as well as showing up well in words. The three main ingredients of The Beverly Hills Gun Club are building material-scaled tube segments sprayed 'air/sea rescue orange', on and under which stiffly perch or cower taxidermied sparrows and rabbits, bearing on the price list Americana titles-the blokey names of guns and hunters- apparently drawn from old copies of American
Handgunner Magazine. Two other key