Mair Gallery, 6th July–7th August 2010

Since the mid 1990s, Andy Leleisi'uao's painted and sculpted works have addressed, often unflinchingly, aspects of fa'a Samoa - particularly its expression in the New Zealand context where processes of immigration, cross-cultural exchange and the levelling effects of the global information economy have engendered profound transformations in New-Zealand-based Samoan society. Engaging head-on with challenging and provocative subjects such as youth suicide, family violence, racism and corruption in the Samoan Church, Leleisi'uao's portrait of Samoan culture diverges sharply from those sunny visions of frangipani, bark cloth and island utopias dismissed by the likes of Pamela Zeplin as 'chic Pacifique.' 1

Throughout Leleisi'uao's oeuvre, figures engaged in confrontation are persistent visual motifs. Sometimes these confrontations are explicitly intercultural. A good example is the artist's Mr Gauguin (2005) - a small pop-sculpture from a series entitled Cheeky Darkie where, mounted on a corned beef tin, a corpulent Simpsons-style character menaces a vulnerable Polynesian girl. At other times the confrontation staged is that of a culture with itself. Hence, another Cheeky Darkie piece, ET in mirror (2005), presents the 'alien' (that is, culturally displaced or estranged) self facing its own reflection (i.e., striving to locate itself, but succeeding only in being enraptured by an intangible illusion).

In more recent, large-scale paintings, the jarring doubling of identity is a common theme. Hence, Janus-like, two-faced Aitu (ghost/spirits) populate works like Goatupi Heads (2009) or Matasio Heads (2009). Here, it is worth noting that Janus is the Roman god associated with transition and change - from childhood to adulthood or one state of being to another. Selfhood as a product of multiple natures conjoined is also expressed by numerous smaller pairs of figures engaged in acts of copulation. In Zeplin's view, these paintings, with their trails of dribbled paint, emerald tonalities and floating figures, recall Bill Hammond's dreamscapes - as well as the colours and rhythms of the Pacific Ocean. However, one might also read Leleisi'uao's paintings as visualisations of what Norman Bryson has dubbed the 'image stream' - the parade of images, continually reproduced and re-combined, that define contemporary visual culture. 2 Thus, it is tempting to see, in the horizontal striations defining the grounds of many of Leleisi'uao's recent works, an evocation of the raster scan on a television screen. The weightless, Bacchanalian frenzies of the artist's figures seem to exemplify the groundlessness of identity in the current epoch, whilst their containment within cells and compartments speaks of identity as both fragmented and sequential - a series of shifting, layered frames in a continually evolving, cross-cultural cartoon or film strip.

David Khan

1 Pamela Zeplin, 'No Frangipani Today: Andy Leleisi'uao and the spaces of possibility' in Andy Leleisi'uao, exh. cat. (Whitespace: Auckland, 2009), np.

2 Norman Bryson, 'Morimura: 3 readings,' Art & Text, n52, September 1995, pp.74-9.

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