John R. P. Hodgson   
2018                                                                              Scroll down for images


John Hodgson
"Waikato 1863: Waste Land", 2018
Oil on canvas on board
800x800mm            NZD 4,500

<sup>This project deploys Lyotardian minor narratives as possible antidotes to the received Truths of popular wisdom, partisan belief and majority prejudice. My minor narratives are the recorded but lost-to-sight or dis-remembered, therefore out-sided, stories of past reportage. This happened. That was done. These were here. They are often inconvenient truths.  There is no overt taking of sides. The intent is not to articulate but merely to hint, to engender curiosity, to engage attention, generate enquiry, and encourage discourse.  There is conversation with previously painted views of a developing New Zealand. In each generation the frame shifts, issues develop, subside, gain new twists and turns. The land remains but it is never the same, seen through different frames.

The project is lane for memory, a mnemonic, a reference, a reminder. Eye candies, visual jewels, decorative accents, crafted artefacts. A teller of stories, bold statements, hidden messages, clever jokes, erudite pronouncements, desperate appeals. Is mine a refined polemic, or a savage expose? A whimsy or a critical history? A painting may serve these ends and more. In New Zealand, painting has sought to articulate perceptions of the land, of arrival, identity, place and origin, to point forwards, to expose concern, to establish community. The project resides somewhere within these traditions.

Titles have a specific function. As Mike Kelley puts it: “Not just any interpretation is good, there’s a certain range of interpretations that are allowed…you are responsible for your interpretation, but you are not totally free.”  These titles are pointers to a discoverable and researchable situation or event, as with Sidney Nolan’s Kelly Gang cycle of paintings.  Significance and judgment are left open to the viewer’s priorities. In the end, for some, these may only be paintings.</sup>