On the wild side

By MICHELE HEWITSON

When Michael Pare-kowhai was a little boy he'd watch his three older brothers go out to hunt rabbits. Too young to tag along, he was made to stay home with his sister and mother, painting and baking cakes.

By the time he was old enough, he somehow wasn't interested in shooting things. So, while the 32-year-old artist's latest exhibition, The Beverly Hills Gun Club (at the Gow Langsford Gallery until June 24), features stuffed rabbits and sparrows, Parekowhai's mark has been made only in the making of the art work. Who killed Bunny? Not the artist.

The closest he came to killing anything was aiming at sparrows in the backyard with his spud-gun. He also owns up to that kid's trick of propping up a box with bread as bait and waiting — and waiting — on the end of a piece of string to spring the trap if a sparrow hopped inside.

"I never caught one," Pare-kowhai says. "They're smart and they're quick. That was the closest I ever got to wildlife."

He still doesn't get too close. Who stuffed Bunny? Not Parekowhai. He talks about "my taxidermist" the way other people talk about "my hairdresser."

Beverly Hills Gun Club viewers get closer. Wander into the gallery and the first thing you see is your own reflection in the large eye in a photograph of a rabbit's head. That rabbit has you firmly in its sights.

There are sparrows the size of eagles. Parekowhai has entered the dreams of sparrows. Inside every sparrow is an eagle trying to get out? Sure, he agrees, laughing. "Just look at that Jonathan Livingston Seagull crap."

Parekowhai likes to "blow things out of all proportion," to make a point. Rabbits are easy game. They are "kind of cute, but they're not. How cute. How fluffy. How rabbitty. But what a pest, what a tragic environmental threat."

Parekowhai's rabbits are slightly menacing, certainly, and a long way from Beatrice Potter's cutesy Peter Rabbit. "Furry feral," Parekowhai calls them.

And the sparrows are the nearest thing to the suburban dweller's idea of a domestic bird. You find them on your back lawn, not in an art gallery. But anyone who has ever had a cup of coffee outside at the Auckland City Art Gallery will acknowledge that there is, as Parekowhai says, "an underlying hidden threat from the non-threatening little sparrow."

There is, too, an underlying chance of schadenfreude. It's funny, he says, when they poop on somebody else's head.

So far, we know what he's getting at. The Gun Club bit is about not belonging to any such club and wondering why, when "my brothers were into cars and guns, I never seemed to get interested. So I was interested in why I didn't."

The Beverly Hills bit is about what he did get interested in. Parekowhai likes to observe the imported: rabbits, sparrows, European art and American television, though he has yet to see Action, the wonderful satire screening on TV3 which has an American producer making a film called ... The Beverly Hills Gun Club.

Parekowhai, the boy from Northcote, is fascinated by the influence of America — to the point where he convinced the woman who is now his wife to get married in Las Vegas. They spent their honeymoon at the Luxor Casino. He gets "tired of art looking [for influence] to Europe. I like the brashness of America."

That brashness is filtered through observations of Pare-kowhai's childhood. There is nostalgia but little sentimentalism reflected in a show he says is American yahooism meets backyard cowboys. Except that in the Parekowhai backyard "everyone wanted to be one of the Indians because they'd win — when we were playing. It was always the white guys who got tied up to the clothesline and sprayed down with the hose.

"Basically it's always been about our growing up and being Maori and having a Pakeha mother, and having Maori relations, and growing up in Northcote. It's not flash but I wouldn't say it's like living in Waihou Bay, where a lot of our relations were and, boy, their car didn't have a bottom in it. It was like the Flintstones: 'Don't put your legs down, kids.'"


• The Beverly Hills Gun Club is at the Gow Langsford Gallery until June 24.