Memoria

Heather Straka

Page Galleries
42 Victoria Street, Wellington

29 July - 14 August 2021

Opening Thursday 29 July, 5.30 - 7.00pm

Auckland artist Heather Straka’s recent works inhabit an eerie liminal space that sees them hovering somewhere between the worlds of painting, photography, and film.

Memoria unfolds inside a series of dilapidated interiors. The scenes and characters occupy a shallow space, dramatically lit, where the stark contrast between dark and light is evocative of the intense theatricality of paintings by old European masters such as Caravaggio or Rembrandt. In these works, Straka deftly draws together an amalgamation of contemporary global and political events, including the global pandemic, the rise of the #metoo movement, and the destruction and removal of sculptures and monuments to colonialism and patriarchal oppression in dozens of cities around the word, in a global groundswell to destabilise the politics of history and its sanctioned authors.

During 2019 Straka created several paintings to hang inside the dark and dusty turn of the century interiors for the television adaptation of New Zealand author Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. Straka is fascinated with the notion of artifice – the idea of the fake or counterfeit is one she repeatedly returns to through her practice – and for the artist this experience acted as something of a natural precursor to the development of new works with an unprecedented level of production. Straka spent countless hours painstakingly designing and constructing sets for these works, inspired by a Germanic hotel from the 1930s, within which she situates and directs her protagonists. The resulting images appear as film stills – individual moments within an expanding cinematic narrative – and are in fact the continuation of a previous series, featuring the same characters that appear in Memoria.