Exhibitions » Exhibition Archive » 2011 » Art in The Auditorium » Nova Paul - This Is Not Dying
Nova Paul, This is Not Dying (2010).
16mm film still. Courtesy of the artist.
Nova Paul - This Is Not Dying
10 August - 5 September 2010 in the Adam Gallery
This Is Not Dying (2010) is based on filmed studies of daily life around Nova Paul’s mārae, Maungarongo, under the mountain Whatitiri (not far from Whangarei). The artist uses an early cinematic optical printing process called three-colour separation to produce prismatic, mutli-layered images where perceived reality takes a strange shift into an unfamiliar realm of colours.
Paul has said, ‘Like water that follows well worn paths along a river, channels of colour trace around significant places to my family.’ The original footage of everyday activities, the place where people swim, lie in the sun, ride motorbikes, eat and converse, is transformed into an ‘elsewhere’, which seems to defy certain rules of time and space.
This Is Not Dying makes simultaneously visible numerous moments in time within each frame. As the distinct red, yellow and blue colour layers move in and out of phase, overlapping to form new colours, we become aware of the Whatitiri mārae setting in terms of a strata of time, of generations of people and their particular activities.
The soundtrack is by kaumatua and famed New Zealand Maori Show Band figure Ben Tawhiti. Tawhiti’s eight-track recording on steel and slide guitar, with whistling and humming, is an improvisation of a traditional Nga Puhi love song, in direct response to the film footage.
Nova Paul (b.1973, Aotearoa New Zealand) is a filmmaker of Te Uri Ro Roi and Te Parawhau /Ngā Puhi descent. This is Not Dying was screened in the 2010 New Zealand International Film festival where Paul’s first film to pioneer this three-colour process, Pink and White Terraces (2006), was screened in 2006. The World of Interiors, a third film using Technicolor processes, was shown at Wellington Film Archive in 2008.
Pink and White Terraces has been exhibited at Bandung Institute of Technology Architecture Gallery, Bandung (2006), City Gallery Wellington and The Physics Room, Christchurch, (2007) Lismore Regional Gallery, Lismore (2007) and Project Space, Melbourne (2008), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010), and Fundación PROA, Argentina (2010).
Solo exhibitions include New Zealand Film Archive (2001, 2008), Gow Langsford Gallery (2007) and Ramp Gallery, Hamilton (2002). Group exhibitions include Martini Shot: New Artists Show, Artspace, Auckland (2007) and The Buzzing Confusion of Things, St Paul Street Gallery, Auckland (2008).
Nova Paul is currently a senior lecturer at AUT University teaching art theory and sculpture in the School of Art and Design. Her film-making and writing practice is concerned with the poetics and politics of place, self-determinacy and oral histories.
In 2008 she co-edited Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), a book that examines how on how long-held attachments to place are transforming in the new media context. The book emerged from an international symposium she co-coordinated called Cultural Futures: Place, Ground and Practice in the Asia Pacific New Media Art (2005).
This Is Not Dying, 2010
DVD, 20 minutes duration
10 August – 5 September 2010
Public Programmes
Screening and Curator’s Talk
Monday 9 August, 6pm