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YUKI KIHARA
from IMPORTANT WORKS
Whakatu Freezing Works, Heretaunga (2017) lenticular photograph edition 5/5 + 2 artist proofs frame: 1090 x 1525 x 45 mm signed certificate
Yuki Kihara’s use of the lenticular process – where the photographic image is seen to move and alter – has become one of her signature characteristics. Invented about the same time as photography itself and a precursor to what we recognise as film and video today, the stop-go process of it elicits considerable awareness of the viewing process and the act of perception in every viewer.
Whakatu Freezing Works, Heretaunga (2017) was part of Te Taenga Mai o Salome, a suite of lenticular photographs commissioned by MTG Hawkes Bay in 2017, openly acknowledging the considerable links between Ngāti Kahungunu and Sāmoa when the ancestral canoe Tākitimu journeying from Hawaiki stopped at Sāmoa before landing at what is now known as Tākitimu Beach.
The link between Sāmoa and the Hawkes Bay grew further again with considerable numbers of Sāmoans working in the factories there from the 1960s onwards. Salome, Kihara’s time-travelling alter-ego, dressed in a Victorian mourning dress, pays homage to them amongst the brutalist architecture of what is now an abandoned site.
