Peter Robinson - Point of Infinite Density
McDougall Contemporary Art Annex
23 July - 29 August 1999
Featuring images and phrases drawn from popular culture, the news media and the
internet, Peter Robinson's large-scale installation in the McDougall Contemporary Art
Annex further explores the artist's ongoing fascination with the ideas of alienation and
cultural dislocation.
While Robinson's early works examined culture and identity, particularly in relation to
his own career path as a "Maori artist", his most recent art practice draws on
his personal experiences as a New Zealander in Europe and focuses on the loneliness and
sense of exile engendered by being separated from one's own culture and language. By
presenting a barrage of eclectic and often satirical images and objects, Robinson invites
the viewer to navigate their own path through the rubble, assembling a fresh narrative
from a set of seemingly random associations. The iconography Robinson has assembled
manifests an environment of isolation and confusion, and includes images such as black
holes, desert islands and koru-like lines spiraling away into nothingness. The'subject' of
this new work is uncertainty, a crisis of confidence only heightened by an unrelenting
barrage of information. The words and signs Robinson has included within the installation
prove disingenuous, with phrases such as "no idea" suggesting that language can
be a barrier as well as an aid to understanding. Peter Robinson has exhibited widely in
New Zealand and internationally and was recently one of fourteen artists selected to
participate in Toi Toi Toi, the largest exhibition of contemporary New Zealand art ever to
be shown in Europe, at the prestigious Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany. Currently
dividing his time between New Zealand and Germany, he will travel to Berlin after the
completion of the Art Annex project to take up a year-long fellowship as the 1999
Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Artist in Residence.
Felicity Milburn
View catalogue online
This exhibition was held at the Robert McDougall Contemporary Art Annex in the Arts Centre.
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