Above Image:
”Spirit Highway”, Gabriel White, 2020
Last year’s lockdown saw most of us become more familiar with the minute details of our neighbourhoods. Abandoned furniture, humorous mailbox signs, cheeky graffiti. Daily strolls around the block and an adjusted pace of life made us more observant to sights that may have once been a “blink and miss” on our commute to work. For Tāmaki Makaurau artist, Gabriel White, spotting these peculiarities has become his act of rebellion and repair in tumultuous times.
It started in Melbourne in 2001 with a VHS camera, where he would explore the city and talk about his dreams, random ideas or anecdotes from his job as a waiter. The practice termed “psycho-geography” focuses on our psychological experiences of cities, revealing forgotten and discarded locations in an urban environment.
“You respond with lateral thinking to mundane situations,” he said.
“I go into places where people wouldn’t normally be doing this, peering into drainpipes and talking to my camera.”
Gabriel White
Broken hub caps become the remnants of a crashed UFO. Patchwork repairs on the tarmac become the entrails of the city. It’s a game that most children are familiar with; the art of make-believe.
When White was later living in Korea, he again continued with the same practice. He found the practice resonated with his strongly-held themes of alienation, isolation and solitude – emotions that many connected with during last year’s lockdown. For White, when 2021 hit, he felt well-prepared to step into the situation.
“I felt, I know how to handle this, I know what this is all about,” he said.
The result is Countdown Mountain, exhibiting at Pah Homestead from 17 February to 3 April. The audio-visual clip, compiled of approximately 60 clips is what White would like to consider, “a meditation”. The short video monologues are arranged alphabetically with a title as a quasi-encyclopaedia.
“I verbally interrogate very mundane things that are in plain sight, but after a few sentences, I have transformed that thing,” he said.
The process of re-imagining the city, paired with humour, is an act of repair, White said. Urban environments often don’t allow much scope for play, he said.
“For me, humour is a rebellion, it’s a way to resist that isolation… I think humour, even sarcasm, can be very sincere… This is an act of repairing my adult soul. I’m trying to assert something that comes naturally to (children), back into me.”
His practice, when observed by bystanders, often raises a few eyebrows.
“They ask, ‘why is that guy outside my garage filming a plastic crate?”
“It probably looks a bit absurdist,” he smiled.
“I hope that they laugh, that they see the humour in it. It’s done in the spirit of cheekiness.”
Countdown Mountain runs from 17 February to 3 April at Pah Homestead.
More info available here
Countdown Mountain (above image)
Prose by Gabriel White
Sometimes New World and Countdown merge into Counterworld - a place where there’s only supermarkets, but they’re mixed up with other things. There’s a supermarket that’s also a forest - you take your trolley through the forest and try not to get lost. There’s a supermarket beach, where the sand makes it hard to push your trolley. There's a supermarket mountain, called Countdown Mountain. You have to push your trolley up the mountain. The higher up the mountain slope you go, and the more shopping goes in the trolley, the lighter it becomes.
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