The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

186 Rohan Wealleans Ritual and excess Rohan Wealleans is fascinated by the processes through which a society develops its own unique and distinctive material culture. In fact, his own art practice might be read as an attempt to build a visual culture from the ground up. Since around 2001, his oeuvre has resembled something like a body of newly discovered artefacts from a lost civilisation — any single object is notoriously difficult to pin down, while collectively they suggest a greater system is at play, replete with its own beliefs, aesthetic codes and influences. Wealleans’s contribution to APT6 brings together three distinct elements: ‘horrorgami’ collages, a ‘ritual painting’, and a sculptural canoe. Each has ritualistic and fetishistic overtones, and shares in an aesthetic of wild excess coupled with a neurotic attention to detail. Each work resembles a self-contained, if perverse, archaeological dig, where an object is methodically buried with the intention of excavating it back out. The result is an extraordinary array of variegated surfaces, which encourage the viewer’s gaze to shift between the whole composition and minute details where countless interior strata are revealed. At the opening of APT6, Wealleans performed a type of consecration rite, in which the bulbous, lumpen form of a ritual painting was disembowelled with a sharp blade, its interior liquid paint spilling onto the floor of the exhibition space. Wealleans first exhibited a ritual painting in Auckland in 2004. 1 In an action that has since taken on mythical status — and sparked debate about the relationship of the artist’s work to Māori and Pacific Islander visual culture — Wealleans arrived at the exhibition opening wearing a Polynesian lava-lava and proceeded to cut the work open in front of gallery visitors, catching the paint that gushed forth in a ceremonial bowl. These performative actions draw connections between diverse and seemingly unrelated cultural and artistic practices — from ritualistic sacrifice and blood- letting to ‘singing-in’ art works into the gallery space, as well as Western art historical points of reference, such as Viennese Actionism and Abstract Expressionism. Begun in 2005, the horrorgami collage works are indebted to the aesthetic of B-grade horror films which, like Wealleans’s work, are shocking not for their realism, but for their sheer excess. In the two examples exhibited in APT6, the artist has enlarged trading cards produced for Steven Spielberg’s seminal 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind , behind which he has placed many layers of paper. When he carves through the surface of the image, the lurid insides erupt outwards in an exuberantly controlled explosion. The collages reveal arcane energies contained within seemingly innocuous bits of pop culture, raising the spectre of beliefs in supernatural forces operating subliminally via popular media. The explosive energies of the horrorgami collages and ritual paintings are tempered by the totemic and portentous presence of Paikea decoy, seed collector 2009 — a store-bought fibreglass kayak covered in layers of paint and carved by the artist. Wealleans is keenly interested in the ability of his works to spark diverse narratives concerning their potential function and meaning, and Paikea decoy, seed collector — like its 2007 counterpart, the black Death boat — seems poised to carry an occupant into the next life. Importantly, this allusive narrative running through Wealleans’s practice emerges not from didactic elements, but from the artist’s formalist, forensic approach to his chosen medium. There is a ‘truth to materials’ attitude at play, but Wealleans shows us that the truth is not what we might think. Paint, for example, has nothing to do with flatness; in Wealleans’s hands it is an alchemical substance capable of transforming objects, and not just their surfaces. His paintings have shape, skin and guts. Wealleans’s synthesis of formalist concerns with an array of cross- cultural references takes on particular significance within the context of APT. The ongoing APT project provides a framework to consider cross-cultural and inter-generational influences, without losing sight of the cultural specificity of an artist’s work. In Rohan Wealleans’s practice, however, cultural specificity is brashly disregarded, and instead disparate chunks of visual cultures are sampled and combined into totally new and compelling forms. Nicholas Chambers Endnote 1 The exhibition ‘Albino’ was held at the Ivan Anthony Gallery in Auckland in 2004.