B.

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 'Māori 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

This exhibition was held at the Robert McDougall Contemporary Art Annex in the Arts Centre.