A text-based single-channel video and handmade leather-bound book using the movie Taxi Driver (1976) as its source.

(First few scenes can be viewed by playing the video on this page.)

Empty Orchestra uses only, and all of, the subtitles from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.   The video work is a hand-drawn replication of the subtitles of the original movie.  Each subtitle is drawn onto individual sheets of paper that are then scanned, the drawing erased and the page re-scanned.  The video is also constructed based on the original timing of the subtitles in Taxi Driver.  The book contains all the remnant sheets of paper, comprising approximately 1200 pages.  The pages have had the subtitles erased, so the viewer sees the slightest traces of text.  The only thing left of Taxi Driver is the time structure and the subtitles. 

Without the actors, scenes and images, the subtitles are disjointed and nonsensical, confronting a viewer who has no idea what the confrontation is.  The book stands as the physical record of the drawings, but with only a trace of the text remaining.  The original content of these drawings only exists as scanned images in a film.

Single-channel video (1:47:01)

Handmade leather-bound book (300 x 240 x 230mm)

The Floor We Walk On (a drawing of our entire house) comprises approximately 1200 rubbings of the entire floor-space of the house my partner and I own in Auckland.  In 2009 we made an emotional and financial commitment of buying a home together, and when we moved to Wellington the rubbings became a way of at once taking leave of the house and taking something of the house with us.  The rubbings from each room were put back together, like a 1:1 map, and then folded into their own set of covers.  This has become a starting point for a larger body of works titled An Open Love Letter.

This work won the 2015 Parkin Drawing Prize and is now part of the Parkin Collection.

“Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours.”  
65 hand-made A4 books; 2014

It started with this quote:

“The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting – fleeting indeed.  Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours.  And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, then silently disassemble and go off to be other things.  And that’s it for you.”*  

‘650,000 hours’ played on my mind for a long time after reading it: a number so large yet so finite.  What hour was I up to?  How many did I, theoretically, have to go?  And what was I doing during these hours that were marching always away?  So, in an exercise of addressing my definite 30-odd-year past and suggested 43-year future, this 65-book series traces, through a list of dates and times, from the hour of my birth to locate my 650,000th hour.

* Bryson, Bill.  (2003).  A Short History of Nearly Everything.  London, United Kingdom:  Black Swan Publishing.

In a single performance of a piece of music split into two parts, the pianist plays through Eric Satie’s Gymnopedies (no. 1 - 3) three times consecutively, first using only one hand, and then the other, with the resulting recordings combined afterwards.  Although the pianist initially keeps her timing, eventually the impossibility of splitting her performance takes its toll; the music becomes mistimed, occasionally to the point of discordant plinking.  

A listener knows what to expect when hearing a familiar piece of music: projecting forward along the path the music will take and jarred if something unexpected happens to a single note.  Gymnopedies has a semi-ubiquitous quality: many people know the composition if they hear it, without knowing how they know it, who the composer is or when they first heard it. The spilt-recording of this strangely familiar piece of music unsettles the listener’s expectations as it weaves between being in-time and falling out of time.

Performance by Maria Mall

Ongoing Inkjet Print Series

Taking test cricket as its subject Series Drawn is an ongoing body of digital prints.  From the three-match Test Series of England’s recent tour to New Zealand there was no result, with all three of the matches ending in a draw.  The prints use archived ‘ball-by-ball coverage’ from cricinfo.com.

Finalist in the 2013 National Contemporary Art Awards.

I feel I was rather old when I realised there are one million millimetres in a square metre, but when I did it was an, ‘of course!’ moment. 1000 squared = 1,000,000 (of course!) – there is a simplicity and beauty, a sheer elegance to this sum. That the commonplace area of one square metre (the size of my kitchen table-top, the size of a small vegetable garden) so neatly contains the almost intangible quantity of a million (the number that is the catch-cry of ambition, ‘to make a million’) is simply pleasing to me. In response, I have made a million dots.

Pencil on Paper, 1m x 1m (2012)

Photographs by Yoon Tae Kim

Sound and book work dealing with the relationship between nature and language.  Book one recorded the first sentence that pertains to nature in each book of the vast majority of my book case.  Book two is a composite of onomatopoeic and echoic words. 

PODOCARPACEAE / Dacrycarpus – PANDANACEAE / Freycinetia
2009-2013; Book and Cuttings, Dimensions Variable

A book occupies a very particular space, and looking at a book has a particular temporality. It collapses into itself the vast area the multiple sheets of paper would otherwise occupy. The folded, stacked and bound sheets necessitates a slow, page-by-page manner of looking, demanding the time of addressing each page as an individual space.

Audrey Eagle’s extraordinary book, Eagle’s Complete Trees and Shrubs of New Zealand encapsulates 50 years of her work, and records every specimen of woody flora from across the entirety of New Zealand.

Through taking my own cuttings from each page of Eagle’s work, my installation allows the images to escape the collapsed space of the book and bypass its page-by-page temporality by presenting, at a single glance, part of every illustrated page. In the remaining book, the removed images confound expectations, disrupting the viewing experience through the many areas of absence.

Eagle, Audrey. (2006). Eagle’s Complete Trees and Shrubs of New Zealand. Te Papa Press: Wellington

A script and a recording bookend a performance: two points of stillness that open and close an act and all that is at play.

Sitting poised ahead of speech, a script is a plan and a directive to action. The script’s iteration fulfils its intention, but it is an inherently passive object; it waits to be acted.

After his death, when clearing out his house, Mum found Uncle Roger’s furled script from a 1960 school production of Toad of Toad Hall (a dramatization of Wind in the Willows) in which he starred as Toad. Illicitly unreturned and then kept by him for fifty-one years, this script is a record of breath expended, words spoken, lines acted. Loosed from its original use, the script’s fragile pages turn through once again to reveal the lines, notes and drawings of its now-absent actor.

Slide installation, 2012
(Each page of the script was photographed, back and front, and each set installed in separate projectors. Slides photographed by Yoon Tae Kim.)

As part of the exhibition An Unkindness of Ravens at the Auckland Film Archive | 2012

Released serially at Viewfinder
Act 1: August 29
Act 2: September 5
Act 3: September 12
Act 4: September 19

After his death, when clearing out his house, Mum found Uncle Roger's furled script from a 1960 school production of 'Toad of Toad Hall' (a dramatization of 'Wind in the Willows') in which he starred as Toad.  Illicitly unreturned and then kept by him for fifty-one years, this script is a record of breath expended, words spoken, lines acted.

As the slide projector carousels are propelled through their cumbersome pirouettes at the Auckland Film Archive revealing each fragile page of this script, the lines, notes and drawings of its now-absent actor are examined at Viewfinder

Sitting poised ahead of speech, a script is a plan and a directive to action.  [TOAD] takes each of Toad's lines and stage directions, and configures them into a text-based film work.  The time of each of Toad's lines and the concomitant erasures when Toad is not directed to act keeps loosely within the time-structure of the original play, the film running the approximate length of 'Toad of Toad Hall'.

Devoid of context, the lines hang somewhat emptily in the air (as well as within the physical space of the screen) when juxtaposed against the normally rich world created through acting.  But small markers of the people who most intimately handled the script creep through: the film is peppered with tracings of schoolboy drawings and notes as they were found in the script, along with the few mistakes by the typist.  

In a nod to the temporality of acting, [TOAD] was released serially, act-by-act in weekly installments over a four-week period.

Text-based film, 1:33:35 and book containing the film's 287 drawings (2012)

The protagonists of a dusty spaghetti western are separated in the gallery, forcing them to perpetually continue their standoff, silently, yet disquietingly, staring at each other across the space.

Films offer a way of viewing and understanding time based on sequence: a linear flow of scene and narrative, one thing happening after another. Stemming from a desire to watch the characters play out the scene simultaneously instead of sequentially, this work disrupts the linear order of time within a film.

Using Sergio Leonie’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, every sixth split second of the penultimate standoff at Sadhill Cemetery is captured as a still image. These are then reconfigured into separate films of each character. As the projections approximate the characters’ positions within the circular graveyard, the viewer takes the fourth position within the standoff. The viewer becomes the implicated but unobserved fourth person to the scene, echoing the characters’ watchful twitches as they anticipate the draw.

Shown At:
This work has shown most recently during An Unkindness of Ravens (2012 and 2013).

Three-Channel Video Projection

Photographs by Yoon Tae Kim

In Little Boy Blue, the salt is taken off the kitchen table and made to run for all its worth, via a stop-motion animation made from a rubber stamp.

For more than 50 years, New Zealand kitchen tables have been graced with Cerebos Iodised Table Salt and its invitation to “See how it runs”. This logo has become an enduring and endearing quirk of New Zealand’s visual culture. My animation is an acceptance of Cerebos’ long-standing invitation.

Take a Rubbing, Leave a Mark is a hand-drawn facsimile of a gallery floor made through a series of rubbings and the unintended trace left behind.

A rubbing pulls into it the shape of floor, the pits and cracks and holes, along with human debris, the hair, dust and skin. A little gross and dirty, but there’s a kind of poignancy in these rubbings as a collection of fragments of existence from this lived-in space.

A reciprocity is established in the taking and leaving. I took something of the gallery in the facsimile of the floor, stealing some of the things that belong to that space; the dust and the skin and the shape of the floor. But I also left something behind in the form of temporary marks, made by the pencil skidding over the edges of the page. These were eventually scuffed away.

Shown At:
This ongoing project has had iterations at RM (where the original was made) and Blue Oyster Project Space, where both a new facsimile was made and the RM facsimile was exhibited.

A red pencil line circumnavigating the interior 2005 Floorplan, and, in echo, a red pencil line circumnavigating the actual space; both 1:1 in scale.

Shown At:
Installation at Blue Oyster Project Space for Drawing (For the Given Value of Drawing) 2010

Part One is the five 6B 'pressure drawings' to release the carbon from the sheet.
Part Two shows the sequence of using up the carbon from the sheet.

Shown At:
Made for Drawing (For the Given Value of Drawing) at Blue Oyster Project Space (2010)

The hallowed paintings of art-history are viewed via a broken down puzzle collection, indirectly forming an installation painting.

Twenty-one, 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles from the Clementoni Museum Collection – each depicting paintings by European artists dating from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century – have been put together, and then broken down into tiles of three by three pieces.

I believe historic paintings carry (in effect, if not in fact) the weight of text and words, both in the sense of the weight of literature about the paintings, the artists and the history, along with their symbolic currency. Encased in their own notoriety, the paintings become pinned as symbols of the stories surrounding them. The installation allows the paintings’ symbolic identities to bleed into one another and activates the white, negative space of the gallery.

Shown at:
Made initially as part of my masters, this work has had two iterations, first in Tender Validation and also in White Boy, White Girl, White Cube.

Puzzles, Dimensions Variable, 2007
Photographs by Nathaniel J. Cooke

In response to changes in broadcasting laws that prevents the satire, ridicule, denigration of politicians filmed in the house, the traditional gravitas of the oil painting condescends to the video document of our (denigrated, satirised and ridiculed) politicians.

Shown At:
Made for the exhibition White Boy, White Girl, White Cube in 2008, this triptych also formed part of my submission to the 2008 Young Blood Salon, and was shown at the finalists’ show at City Art Rooms.

Oil on board, 2008, each 500mm x 700mm.

Series of drawings made during my Masters, and giving rise to my present line of inquiry in drawing.