Wayne Youle, art, wellington, city, gallery, contemporary art nz, new zealand, city gallery wellington, art gallery nz, art exhibitions

Rated - 201 Photographs by Wayne Youle

19 July - 19 August 2001 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
Working in a range of media Wayne Youle (Ngāti Whakaeke, Ngā Puhi) tends to explore racial issues, particularly identity issues facing Māori and bicultural New Zealand. A defiant stance threads through much of his work: he has defaced perfectly rendered road-signs, such as the bright orange ‘Men at Work’, with facial moko to jolt stereotypical assumptions; and he has constructed pointed white KKK hats out of old Bank of New Zealand money bags to comment stridently on the effect of colonial land grabs on Māori. Rated likewise holds up a challenge, requiring viewers to see for themselves what they find offensive or morally problematic.

Youle has scoured books, magazines, CD covers and websites to photograph the 201 images in Rated, and his selection and arrangement of photographs is intended to test the limits of acceptable visual culture. There are graphic images of acknowledged atrocities and of those still swept beneath the carpet, such as modern-day sweatshops and the imprisonment and maltreatment of late nineteenth century Māori. There are the sexually explicit images which have given the exhibition its R.18 rating—some from magazines and others from reproductions of the explicitly erotic work of American artist Jeff Koons, but all publicly accessible from bookshop or library shelves. There are photographs of artwork picturing Māori people and motifs by historical and contemporary artists—images which Youle finds personally offensive.

These softly toned black and white images printed on old photographic paper slightly peeling off the wall evoke the atmosphere and aesthetic of an archive in miniature. A record of our visual culture unfolds around the gallery; a record of the ethics of image-making and the subjectivity of interpretation. The feat of filling the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery with 201 photographs seems suggestive of the image-laden nature of contemporary culture, but the small-scale of each individual photograph requires the viewer to peep into, to get perhaps uncomfortably close to the ethical implications of each image.

Rebecca Wilson