“Send in the Clowns is a new series of still-life tableaux often staffed by antique mechanical toys and buffoonish figures from the Italian commedia dell’ arte. These are juxtaposed with fragments of the New Zealand landscape from Hikurangi to the Lindis Valley. As with earlier works they can be read as meditations on colonial attempts to harness or subdue the natural world. Bringing predetermined solutions to sometimes unyielding problems. This conceit is echoed by the limited movements and repeated gestures of the comic figures.”
— Michael Hight
Michael Hight (b.1961, Stratford) is a self-taught painter who has been regularly exhibiting since the 1980s. Initially focussing on abstract painting. the mid-1990s saw Hight shift toward a photorealist style, and he soon became widely recognised for his remarkable ability to capture the unique geographies of Aotearoa in vivid and immaculate detail.
Found objects play an important role in Hight’s work. Often the artist acquires these curios near a particular landscape and arranges them in these painted configurations analogous to theatres of memory, as he recalls his own personal experiences while also drawing upon national histories. Various recurring motifs — scales, beehive smokers, cake stands, unspecified objects wrapped in cloth or tied up with string — allude to the desire to quantify or control. Beehives are present here too, as if displaced from Hight’s other familiar painting series that similarly addresses the relationship between our natural and built environments. A cast of figures parades across a series of dark canvasses; clad in costumes and masks as befitting the style of Italian theatre popularised throughout Europe between 16th and 18th centuries. These works are heavy with significance, yet their origin and meaning remain invitingly mysterious.
Accompanying these paintings sit a pair of Hight’s take on wunderkammern or cabinets of curiosities, those almost magical repositories for all manner of wondrous and unusual objects. Hight defines the composition of these works by employing a set of shelving units, with each compartment containing objects alongside fragments of archetypal New Zealand landscapes.
