Finn McLachlan is a young lens-based artist living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara who recently got a scholarship to visit Aotearoa's subantarctic islands.
This exhibition will present images and video from the trip, taken from a variety of cameras - both digital and analogue, including a crude analogue video camera that was made especially and which will also be on display!
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Artist statement:
New Zealand's subantarctic islands aren't very well known, even among New Zealanders. Often seen in the form of a still image, I aimed to observe and then prove that these islands aren't still; they are thriving, dynamic ecosystems. For this, I needed to unlock the 'moving image'.
The physical process of capturing digital video is to most people an entirely abstract process that creates a certain barrier or disconnect between the viewer and the subject. Rolling shutters and electronic photo sensors aren't easy to wrap your head around. Even traditional film movie cameras contain complex mechanisms whose inner workings are reserved only for the minds of experts. To counter this, I built my own crude analogue video camera, which I named the Toroa-Sub.
The inner workings of this camera are simplified to the extreme. To take a video clip (max 2 seconds at a time) requires only one moving part. This camera takes a photo out of each of the individual 24 lenses on the front, onto 35mm film, across the span of two seconds. Then, if you play these photos back at the same rate as they were taken, it creates a moving image (2s of 12fps).
My goal is that this crude simplification, the elimination of abstract physical processes, makes these shaky little video clips more of a direct imprint of the reality of these islands. The light I captured underwent an easy-to-understand process that aimed to make the resulting images more haptic, genuine and confronting.
Another idea I want to discuss in this project is the concept of 'disabling absences'. This refers to a process of decolonisation that removes expectations of landscapes which are born from a westernised worldview. These islands are often described as desolate, barren or lost, but I argue that these absences and lack are wholly impositions of our pākehā/settler western mindset. They are not 'lacking' any towns, roads, fields or churches, because these simply do not belong here. I would love to discuss this through poems and photos, to question these hurtful colonial settler ideologies that persist today.
- Finn McLachlan
The exhibition will run until 31st August
Special thank you to Creative New Zealand for supporting Pyramid Club's programme
