PreMillennial Signs of the Soon Coming Storm

PreMillennial, a collaborative effort by two New Zealand-born artists, Mike Stevenson and Ronnie van Hout, plays upon the anxieties of a paranoid and future-obsessed society that is rapidly approaching the new millennium.

In contrast to the friendly little green men of the 1950s, recent tales of alien encounters in the 1990s have been characterised by abductions, invasive medical examinations and sophisticated governmental cover-ups. In the wake of Roswell, the X Files and Oliver Stone, we have become fascinated by evil empires and seduced by the faintest hint of conspiracy.

PreMillennial provides a compelling and often humorous insight into a brave new world where aliens and sinister government forces lurk behind every tree, door and computer screen.

Mike Stevenson's work consists of exquisite pastel copies of images from magazines such as Artforum, Time and Art New Zealand. Stevenson has doctored the appearance of the original photographs and, when his drawings are lit by an flashing ultra violet light, hidden messages and secret slogans are revealed. One image shows American artist Jeff Koons in front of a classroom of children, a celebrated picture from Artforum magazine. Stevenson's version includes the scrawled words 'Accept The Mark' on the blackboard, along with '666' emblazoned on Koons' forehead. These cryptic changes play on the wide-spread public suspicion that contemporary art is based on hoaxes and confidence tricks and show how the subliminal techniques of advertising so familiar to a consumer society can be used to brainwash and subdue the population in readiness for an alien invasion.

In Ronnie van Hout's installation for PreMillennial, ghostly faked UFO photographs are juxtaposed with copies of the artist's own employment documentation and two unemployment applications generated by the New Zealand Labour Department. On these forms, van Hout is listed as an 'artist seeking work', highlighting the common conception that art is not a 'real job', and questioning the continued relevance of the artist in today's world. The governmental data serves as a reminder of the enormous public machine dealing with these sorts of 'private documents' and hints at other documents (the real-life X Files) the government may be keeping secret. Twelve small dioramic models, fashioned from hobbyist's plastic, complete van Hout's display. These tiny scenarios of destruction add to a growing sense of the redundancy of art in this violent apocalypse.

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