Discovering happiness of accidents

By LINDA HERRICK Arts editor

Don't be deceived by the humble exterior of the Moving Image Centre in Grey Lynn. The MIC, set up 10 years ago as a platform for multi-media art, sits just off a stretch of Great North Rd which houses a string of car yards and no-frills sandwich bars.

But step inside the MIC's doors and you're in another world. A beautiful, colourful world, as a pair of video-sound installations reveal this month. Inside the entrance, a wall-wide video sways with images of underwater life, a mesmerising production called Aquarama created by former Fetus Productions' icon Jed Town.

Town has been making such "soundscapes" for some years, but next door has Lost Discoverer, the first major exhibition by his friend Amber de Boer.

Digi-prints on the walls of her show tell visual stories of children whirling around in carnival teacups, fear and delight in their eyes. Elsewhere, a circus acrobat floats through the air and a wall is dominated by a huge image of a Cook Island girl lost in the enchantment of dance.

But it's the video images at one end of the gallery which prove unexpectedly moving: a sequence, with music by Paul Embling, of the shapes of a fence, a whiskered seal gliding through the water at Auckland Zoo, the pure pleasure of the Cook Island dancers, the blue globe of the world spinning through space.

"They are the kind of images my husband [sculptor Andrew de Boer] calls 'Amber vision', seeing the world with rose-tinted glasses," says de Boer, 36. "I have worked in advertising and I wanted these to be an advertisement for happiness.

"I had one other show, at the Corbans Estate. It was around September 11 and it was dark and scary, whereas this show is about happiness. I want to express beauty in the present moment, simple little things."

The images of the young dancer, Marthalena Heather, for example, were taken during an early morning ceremony at the Corbans Estate. The weather was gloomy and de Boer, who works without lights and the usual photographic paraphernalia, had no expectations.

"When I was watching Marthalena, it was like watching the Virgin Mary dance, it was so pure and beautiful I had tears in my eyes. And then the sun came out and shone through a skylight and touched her hands and face as she danced. All of these images were taken when I least expected something good to come of them so they are spontaneous and magical in their own way."

De Boer, who grew up in Ponsonby, has been working with cameras since childhood when she used to play with her grandfather's Polaroid. When she left high school, she studied for an arts degree at Auckland University, taking papers in film.

Life changed when she married Andrew in 1991. Their arts-council-funded honeymoon destination was a carving village called Tengenenge in the north of Zimbabwe, a day's drive from Harare. He cut rock, she filmed constantly, and the result was a documentary film called Tengenenge: The Spirit of Stone.

"That documentary got me into the [now defunct] diploma of broadcasting at Auckland University," she recalls. "I became influenced by Annie Goldson [maker of Georgie Girl, Punitive Damage] and her experimental, politicised style."

De Boer made a diploma documentary on the politics of adoption called Staying Mum, and after graduating she went on to work as a researcher on an adoption-themed project for Communicado.

"I quickly realised that that style of documentary-making was a low form of art. I think New Zealand documentary-making in the 90s was a very sad art form. You can't make politically aware documentaries for television in this country. It's tragic."

De Boer became aware of Jed Town when she was a teenager obsessed with music and fascinated by Fetus Productions' surreal multi-media productions. They met only a year ago, when they discovered they had much in common. When Town introduced de Boer at the MIC opening, he said, "We are basically on the same trip".

De Boer agrees: "Our work is music and visuals. It's not advertising, it's not documentary, we don't have an A to B narrative."

She says she had no idea she could ever be considered an artist. "I was always looking for something. I was really lost. I used to think there was nothing in material culture that satisfied me. I've always collaborated with my husband on his projects but I came to some sort of crisis last year and realised I was living vicariously through him.

"Then, at some stage around that time I had video footage from the past 10 years I was showing to a friend visiting from Canada and my husband said, 'Amber, you've got a show here'."

Lost Discoverer, she explains, is from a Pablo Neruda poem - "a dichotomy, like black and white, lost and found, looking for something but never finding it".

With both shows featuring images of water, it felt like fate when Marthalena Heather and the group of dancers attended the opening - and de Boer filmed Marthalena once more, dancing against the backdrop of Town's Aquarama. "This whole show has been about connection. All my art is like a happy accident."

Visual arts

* What: Lost Discoverer, by Amber de Boer

* Where & when: Moving Image Centre, cnr Great North Rd/Elgin St, until Sept 6