Fault Lines

No country trades more on its image of natural beauty than New Zealand. There is no mistaking the Pure NZ brand of clean, green and unspoiled. Lurking beneath these calm waters is a very different story. The stasis that characterises much of New Zealand urban environments is often disrupted by violent seismic activity while the social landscape is fraught with disadvantage, exclusion, addiction and racial tension. The Polynesian harmony of tourism campaigns masks the confrontation of gang violence that is played out daily on city streets. The warrior ethos of pacific first nations people bubbles over continually with gun violence and domestic disharmony a national epidemic. Things are not what they appear. Choosing wisely or not to step in the vernacular footsteps of NZ's most celebrated photo media artist Fault Lines gives expression to this stasis through an examination of form that speaks of Polynesian adornment, the commonplace and oddly placed and the lived anxiety of the next seismic tremor. Mediated nature is found throughout alongside heroic municipal expression. It is at once familiar yet strangely alien.