Gavin Hipkins – Erewhon – The Book of the Machines

Invitation

Installation

Gavin Hipkins

Erewhon(Models), 2014

archival pigment prints, ed edition of 7

Gavin Hipkins

Erewhon (Mountains), 2014

archival pigment prints, ed edition of 7

Gavin Hipkins

Erewhon(Mask), 2014

archival pigment prints, ed edition of 7

Gavin Hipkins

Erewhon(Path), 2014

archival pigment prints, ed edition of 7

Gavin Hipkins

Erewhon (Car), 2014

archival pigment print, ed edition of 7

Gavin Hipkins

Erewhon (Machine), 2014

archival pigment prints, ed edition of 7

Gavin Hipkins

Erewhon(Origins), 2014

archival pigment prints, ed edition of 7

Gavin Hipkins

Erewhon(Red Planet), 2014

archival pigment prints, ed edition of 7

Gavin Hipkins

Erewhon (Engine), 2014

archival pigment print, ed edition of 7

Gavin Hipkins

Erewhon (Forest), 2014

archival pigment prints, ed edition of 7

Erewhon: The Book of the Machines (2014) is a suite of 14 photographs exhibited alongside a 26 minute looped video. The project calls on the key chapter The Book of the Machines taken from Samuel Butler's anonymously published 1872 novel Erewhon, Or Over the Range. The new work is realised in conjunction with the artist's recently completed feature length essay film Erewhon that premiered at Edinburgh Art Festival and the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2014. Produced over a two-year period, and shot in New Zealand, Australia, and India, Erewhon is the artist's first feature film. For the artist, "Butler's poetic meditations on industrial society and colonialism remain a timely reflection on contemporary society and our technological dependencies."

Revisiting Butler’s strategies of inversions and reversals in the essay film genre, Erewhon (an anagram of the word ‘nowhere’), charts the narrator’s journey from a Canterbury high country sheep farm to a fictional society where vegetarianism is the law, and machines are banished to museums for fear of their becoming conscious. The film’s monologue cites key meditations from the nineteenth-century novel, including pre-birth, artificial intelligence, education and reason, and vegetarianism. Referencing Butler’s prophetic ideas of utopian discontents, technological dependencies, and colonial imperatives, the project asks a contemporary audience to consider these themes in our age of globalisation and diaspora.

Gavin Hipkins is an Auckland-based artist who works with photography and film. Over the last two decades his practice has engaged postcolonial, architectural, and commodity discourses via a range of analogue and digital technologies, photo-installations, and artist videos. In 2010 he started making fragmented narrative short films that frequently call on nineteenth-century references. He adapts these writings to contemporary settings. His projects engage film as a cinematic art that blurs definable genres between drama, documentary, essay film, and experimental narrative structures.

Gavin Hipkins has exhibited widely. Recent screenings and exhibitions include: International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2015); Museum of Arts and Design, New York, USA (2014); City Art Centre and Filmhouse Cinema, Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland (2014); Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany (2013); Armory Film, The Armory Show, New York (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2011); Austrian Museum of Applied Art and Contemporary Art (MAK), Vienna, Austria (2011); Gallery of Modern Art and National Gallery of Victoria, Australia (2010).

Further reading and Erewhon’s trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNaKR29QtHU
http://www.nziff.co.nz/2014/auckland/erewhon/
http://pantograph-punch.com/review-erewhon/