Celebrating the kitsch that is Maori Vegas

By ANDREW CLIFFORD

An old portable hi-fi sits atop the table in the Anna Miles Gallery. John Rowles is belting out a brassy rendition of If I Only Had Time and littered around the stereo are old LPs.

They are albums you are more likely to find in bric-a-brac shops than in a downtown gallery, but many of the covers feature faces that also adorn the gallery walls - a suited Billy T. James, Prince Tui Teka on a motorcycle, a young Kiri Te Kanawa in fur and, yes, a coiffed John Rowles in a tassled suede cowboy jacket.

As well as being remnants from the previous night's opening of Gina Matchitt's Geyserland Hotel exhibition, the records are a roll call of Maori entertainers who have put New Zealand on the map with a distinctly Maori-Vegas sheen.

The exhibition takes its title from the hotel where a teenage Matchitt waitressed while growing up in the tourist mecca of Rotorua. "All the hotels have little kapa haka parties that perform for the tourists," recalls Matchitt.

"There was only a little one in this hotel and one of the guys who came in was a friend of mine from school. They would have their plastic piupius - you had real ones if you were in the really flash concert parties. When I asked him what he was up to he said, 'Playing Maoris'."

This statement struck a chord with Matchitt, whose fascination with the way Maori culture is packaged and presented is the basis of her latest exhibition.

"I started thinking about who were at the forefront of Maori entertainers. Rotorua has a whole tradition of that. Then there's the whole Whakarewarewa thing, with souvenirs and that kind of thing," says Matchitt, a cousin of the eminent sculptor Para Matchitt.


"When I got older, there was very much a cringe factor and I really wanted to distance myself from it and get away from Rotorua. But you look back and go, 'Wow, that's a pretty unique childhood'."

Especially unique are the bizarre cultural overlaps that arise, such as Billy T. James and Prince Tui Teka acquiring a penchant for Mexican sombreros.

Auckland sculptor Michael Parekowhai has already adopted Elvis Presley and Englebert Humperdink as Maori cultural forebears, and it is little wonder that the young Matchitt once mistook Rowles as coming from Hawaii, not Kawerau.

Matchitt enjoys the so-called aberrations of sequinned warriors and plastic tiki. "I'm just interested in that contemporary culture. I love the traditional stuff and I respect it, but that was only a part of it. The whole package was the tourist-kitsch."

The works in Geyserland Hotel are presented on large, brightly coloured disks that reject the usual brown palette in favour of bright pink, purple and yellow.

"If you look around Rotorua at how people paint their houses, and particularly Maori houses, there is a lot of psychedelic purple and olive green."

Matchitt has an unmistakable pop sensibility. It is evident in the Warhol-like repetitions of Maori personalities (Kiri as Marilyn Monroe?), printed like fridge magnets on to small disks.

It also filters through from earlier work - her 1999 exhibition Merchandise blended the icons of commerce, Christianity and Maoridom for a wry commentary on Maori urbanisation using a Maori-fied Nike swoosh, tobacco branding and a sanctified pair of golden arches.

"That was talking about more negative aspects, whereas this is really more positive and celebratory," she says of Geyserland Hotel.

She has achieved this by arranging the magnetic disks into modernised geometric shapes of taniko weaving patterns.

"I think this gives them some mana. If you had a taniko border on your cloak, you were really high ranking. I'm interested in modernism and a lot of the 20th-century thing - the way Maori have adapted a lot of European materials and imagery."

Exhibition

* What: Geyserland Hotel, by Gina Matchitt

* Where and when: Anna Miles Gallery, Suite 4J, Canterbury Arcade; Thursday-Friday, 11am-6pm; Saturday, 11am-4pm; until May 29