The Downfall of Light, 2011
Digital Vídeo SD, 6´32"
City Gallery, Wellington, New Zeland
Murray Hewitt
The Downfall of Light 2011
The work by Murray Hewitt is based in Te Urewera, New Zealand’s largest National Park. A white or P?keh? New Zealander, the artist works at a contested site, a place where the T?hoe people indigenous to the region have always vehemently resisted Crown ownership and presence. The Downfall of Light consists of seven black and white waterfalls, their form recalling the paintings of New Zealand modernist painter Colin McCahon. For McCahon the waterfalls began with those of British colonial painter William Hodges, and came to symbolically represent man’s fall and resurrection, the tumbling water a promise of revelation and illumination. More generally, waterfalls are often connected with ideas of utopia, of an untainted natural landscape such as is associated with the beautiful Te Urewera region.
Hewitt consciously complicates such a reading, literally turning the metaphor upside down. The water cascades slowly in reverse, its anticipated abundance and power undercut by this reversal. Ownership of the land also implies rights to its waterways; the backward-flowing falls might be read as a kind of ‘taking back’—but by whom, and from whom? The artist is not in the frame to tell us, but from behind the camera he enacts a subtle and subversive un-doing of established narratives. Seven times he presents this element of the natural landscape receding, in a state deeply unnatural, and destabilising the idea that earth was created solely for our use. The bleaching out of colour historicises the image of the waterfall, suggesting the early colonial photographs through which the New Zealand landscape was commodified and ‘sold’ overseas.
Murray Hewitt was born in 1969 in Hastings, he now lives in Moera in Lower Hutt. He holds a Masters degree in Fine Arts from Massey University, Wellington (2007) and works predominantly in video. His works have contemplated consumer behavior, remembered historic events, or mulled over current political ones through the considered actions of a lone costumed figure, or repetitive stationary camera shots that encourage sustained deliberation from the viewer. He currently works as an art installer for a number of galleries in Wellington, and as a picture framer. Recent solo exhibitions include The secrets of their own hearts at City Gallery Wellington (2012); To Pluck Water at Ramp Gallery, Hamilton (2012); and Antipodal at The Physics Room, Christchurch (2012). Hewitt was also included in the group exhibition Contact: Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany (2012) and is associated with the arts agency CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa.