Ronnie van Hout
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1962
House and School
- 2001
- Mixed Media
- Purchased 2004
- 2004/49.a-k
Tags: buildings (structures), houses, landscapes (representations), monitors (data processing equipment), schools (buildings), urban landscapes
Ronnie van Hout’s installation recreates his childhood home in Aranui, a suburb of eastern Christchurch, and his primary school in nearby Wainoni. A looped video replays his daily bike ride between the two locations. Together, these elements present the story of van Hout’s beginnings.
Familiar architectural structures, however, are taken beyond the ordinary by the presence of a hovering, makeshift UFO, whose surveillance results appear on a nearby monitor. Can we read this as a picture of suburban childhood experience as an alien might see it, or as the artist’s memorial to the need for imaginative survival and escape?
(Above ground, 2015)
Exhibition History
![Ronnie van Hout Failed Robot [detail] 2007. Polystyrene, fibreglass and paint. Private collection, Melbourne. Reproduced courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Vicki Petheridge.](/media/cache/ac/55/ac55915a583a8963234e8a1665b42204.jpg)
With this installation Ronnie van Hout recreates his childhood home in the Christchurch suburb of Aranui, and his primary school in nearby Wainoni.
A looped video replays the breathless bike ride between these two locations, while a makeshift UFO hovers above, the results of its surveillance visible on another monitor. Together, these objects reflect van Hout’s fascination with dislocation, estrangement and otherworldliness.
Van Hout was born in Christchurch and studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, majoring in Film Studies. His work is represented in collections in New Zealand and internationally. In 2004 Van Hout held a Creative New Zealand Visual Arts Residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. (Label from about 2007)
Related reading: Above Ground
Interview
Not Quite Human
Lara Strongman: The title of your new work for the Gallery is Quasi. Why did you call it that?
Ronnie van Hout: Initially it was a working title. Because the work would be outside the Gallery, on the roof, I was thinking of Quasimodo, from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I was coming out of a show and research around the idea of the freak, the outsider and things that are rejected—thinking about how even things that are rejected have a relationship to whatever they’ve been rejected by. And I called it Quasi, because it’s a human form that’s not quite human as well. The idea of something that resembles a human but is not quite human.
Notes
Christchurch-born artist Ronnie van Hout part of Populate!
Ronnie van Hout is the artist responsible for the mysterious figure pointing skywards that has appeared on the roof of a central city building.
Notes
Life lessons
Open, closed or merged; there's no doubt these are challenging days for all schools in Canterbury.
Notes
Night light
Ronnie van Hout's latest film, The creation of the world, is a nocturnal highlight on Worcester Boulevard at present.
Notes
I lived here
Some public art has been ruined by the earthquake: look at poor old Godley and Rolleston. But some has actually become better and more resonant – risen to the occasion, you might say. A prime example sits inconspicuously at the entrance to a suburban driveway on Breezes Road near the settling ponds, in the heart of the hard-hit east.
Notes
The Easy Ride
Cycling is still one of the easiest way to get round the inner suburbs of Christchurch after the run of recent earthquakes, but you have to have your wits about you.
Notes
But seriously
When it comes to contemporary painting, seriousness has a way of turning into solemnity, and solemn art is just asking for it.
Notes
Yertle the Turtle by Glen Hayward
This article first appeared in The Press as 'An Ode to Yertle the Turtle' on 13 May 2015.
Notes
Louise Henderson, Addington Workshops
For many years, the piercing whistle of the railway workshops off Blenheim Road was Addington's alarm clock.
Notes
New exhibition: Shifting Lines
Here's a little from behind the scenes. Shifting Lines opens tomorrow, 9 November, and runs until 19 January 2014. It's a show about drawing as an idea, which is permitted here to take very different forms. It includes work by six artists – Andrew Beck, Peter Trevelyan, Katie Thomas, Pip Culbert, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano – all of whom use line to investigate space and structure in unexpected ways.
Notes
Rooftops, backyards, urban scapes
As a supplement to the article in today's Press GO section, highlighting the recent purchase of Ivy Fife's Untitled (Towards Worcester Street from St. Elmo Courts), here's a modest selection of paintings of rooftops, backyards and urban scapes from the collection...
Notes
The Queen's visit by Ivy Fife
This article first appeared as 'Hello and goodbye' in The Press on 5 October 2012.
Notes
Factory at Widnes by L.S. Lowry
This article first appeared in The Press on 13 October 2004
Laurence Stephen Lowry painted Factory at Widnes in 1956, at which time he was Britain's most famous living painter. Lowry's fame increased in that year as he became the subject of a BBC television documentary, though his work had already been popular in British homes and schools as reproductions since the end of the war. If appreciation for his individualistic painting style was widespread, there was also fascination with L.S. Lowry the artist, who had projected in the press the image of a lonely recluse.
Commentary
Above Ground
I go into the Gallery. Haven’t been there in a while. Building closed. It was open to begin with. Civil Defence HQ in the weeks following the shock that laid the city low and who knew glass could be so strong, so resilient? Then the Gallery closed. It was cordoned off, behind wire netting. Something was going on in there. Someone said something had cracked in the basement. Someone said they needed to insert a layer of bouncy forgiving rubber beneath glass and concrete, ready for any future slapdown.
Commentary
City of Shadows and Stories
If cities are the ground into which we plant stories, the soil of Ōtautahi – later Christchurch – is undergoing a protracted tilling season. Five years is a long unsettlement in human terms; on a geological (or indeed narratological) scale, time moves more gradually. Christchurch exists today as a rich aggregation of narratives, propping up physical edifices of crumbling stone and cardboard.
Article
Shifting Lines
It's where we live: the encrusted surface of a molten planet, rotating on its own axis, circling round the star that gives our daylight. Geographically, it's a mapped-out city at the edge of a plain, bordered by sea and rising, broken geological features. Zooming in further, it's a neighbourhood, a street, a shelter – all things existing at first as outlines, drawings, plans. And it's a body: portable abode of mind, spirit, psyche (however we choose to view these things); the breathing physical location of unique identity and passage.
Article
De-Building
For many passers-by, Christchurch art Gallery is identified by its dramatic glass façade—the public face it presents to the world. but De-Building is an exhibition that offers a very different view. bringing together the work of fourteen artists from new Zealand and farther afield, this group exhibition draws inspiration from the working spaces gallery-goers seldom see: the workshops, loading bays and back corridors; the scruffy, half-defined zones.