Armageddon

Berlin-based New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson is well known for his precisely researched large-scale installations based on obscure historical events. In 2003 he represented New Zealand at the 50th Venice Biennale with 'This is the Trekka' 2003, a work exploring Cold War economic ties between New Zealand and Czechoslovakia and included a fully restored Trekka (New Zealand's only designed and manufactured vehicle). His fascination with Australian artist Ian Fairweather’s intrepid 1952 voyage from Darwin to Timor led him to create 'Argonauts of the Timor Sea' 2004, which featured a recreation of Fairweather’s homemade raft. The three dry pastel drawings in the collection by Stevenson come from an earlier moment but reveal the artist’s preoccupation with alternative histories and communities of belief, articulated through fastidiously made objects and images. Among Stevenson’s best-known works of the 1990s are realistic drawings which explore improbable connections between the world of contemporary art (itself a community of belief) with other social and political worlds. The time and labour invested in these meticulous works imbues them evidentiary weight and a sense of private conviction, as if Stevenson is a maverick researcher or conspiracy theorist earnestly revealing dark subtexts and hitherto undocumented political affinities. In the three works in the Art Gallery’s collection, Stevenson locates hints of apocalypse and extremist conspiracy theories within images of avant-garde American art practice. A viewer is left to decide whether these images are fabrications or exposés, revelations of truth or extensions of the paranoid thinking they seem to document. The atomisation of the public sphere, the emergence of ‘post-truth’ politics, and the profusion of algorithm-driven extremism in the decades since Stevenson made these works makes them seem sharply prescient.