Shining

Awatea Matatau: The Dawning of Light and Knowledge is an exhibition of works exploring light, by students of the Maori Visual Arts degree from Massey University.

This year it's a good crop. The exhibition of the Massey Maori Visual Arts candidates has become a yearly event at Te Manawa Art, and with each passing we do see change, each grouping having a certain feeling about them, different from the last.

As a body, they make a significant and ongoing contribution in Palmerston North, this year particularly widespread, with Square Edge adding extra space to last year's graduates, and Israel Birch, an old boy, in one of the side galleries of Te Manawa.

The focus or theme of the work exhibited by students at Te Manawa in 2009 is light. Even previously, there has always been a strong basis on the use of technology and unusual materials (so much so that it implies an emphasis of the course to move Maori art into the materials of the contemporary age), but using light as a motif brings with it increasingly complex methods for its instigation.

Here, the use of video, digital printed Perspex, computerised LED syncopations, light boxes and fluorescents makes it almost futuristic, bright and sparkling, with a background sound track adding a certain theatrical element to the installations.

It is an interesting juxtaposition, as many of the works have their concepts based on the ancient. Modern materials illustrating primordial ideas such as the relationship of man to the Earth (Papatuanuka). Like the artwork with complex patterning panels with intermittent flashing light of different colours giving the sense of a high-fi version of panels from the marae or of the night sky as used in early navigation. Or in the panelled and free-standing works, where plastic ties replace the flax weaving, wrapped around wooden dowels in front of lights, they deliberately transcribe tradition with a modern twist.

Technology certainly has its seduction. Your lines don't wobble and it offers a sleek sophistication, but it can be impersonal and cold. When you give up the marks made by the human hand and instead chose expression through complex circuitry, it can create distance.

Personalities do manage to find their way through. A series of light boxes by a Samoan artist using computer-generated collages have a somewhat Americanised sense, a gaudy delight in the patterns of the lava-lava interspersed with bright lights of the streets and the urban environment.

My favourite works, perhaps indicating my own biases, are the least technological, nine black-and-white photographs of fungi, life forms that grow in the dark, striking enough images of their own account, but onto each is strung nylon threads making square markings that lead back to a mount above, each of the pictures squared in different angles. Visually, these read as small shafts of light from unseen windows, foggy as if with small particles of dust (perhaps the spores of mushrooms) floating in them. This, a conjuring of light into something permanent and tangible, whatever readings we are meant to take, is sublime.

Awatea Matatau: The Dawning of Light and Knowledge, artwork by the Bachelor and Master of Maori Visual Art students Senia Eastmure, Ngahina Hohaia, Karangawai Marsh, Kura Puke and Bridget Reweti at Te Manawa ART in the large exhibition space. The exhibition runs until February 14.

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