Choose Happiness

Happiness is by its very nature ephemeral. Sometimes it is a state that we might only identify in hindsight. Increasingly there is an expectation that we should be happy all the time (fuelled by the self-help movement and proliferation of wellness apps), putting further pressure and expectation on these temporal moments. Choose Happiness was a group exhibition of work by emerging, mid-career and established artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand that acknowledged happiness as a transient state, one only truly understood through experiencing its opposite.

For some, joy came through the very act of making - in the bright brushstrokes of Angela Brennan’s ebullient canvases or in the urgent, painterly scribbles of Salome Tanuvasa, enacted amidst the flurry of everyday family life. For others, happiness was tied to place - in the radiant, unmediated pleasure of painting on Country evidenced in the landscapes of Gwenneth Blitner or in the mosh pit of a rock concert filmed in slow motion by Angelica Mesiti (a sight made all the more poignant in the age of social distancing). Choose Happiness shifted between these exaltations of joy and more darkly humorous perspectives - Yvonne Todd photographed prim young models with forced smiles, Grant Stevens created a self-help video on steroids, complete with new age soundtrack and Matthew Harris injected his lurid, pop coloured paintings with unhinged scenes of depravity.

Choose Happiness encouraged us to be kind to ourselves too, by including works that conveyed strength in vulnerability. Natasha Matila-Smith revealed interior states; particularly the desire to love and be loved; Jemi Gale visualised wishful futures impacted by haunted pasts; Deme Te Atawhai Scott acknowledged the passage of time and the complex love of family and Noriko Nakamura presented unconventional portraits of motherhood focusing on motherhood’s perils and pleasures.

Happiness is complicated. From aspirations and longing to joy and euphoria, Choose Happiness explored the realities of happiness and its many spectrums.

Exhibiting artists: Angela Brennan, Angelica Mesiti, Deme Te Atawhai Scott, Grant Stevens, Gwenneth Blitner, Jemi Gale, Matthew Harris, Natasha Matila-Smith, Noriko Nakamura, Salome Tanuvasa and Yvonne Todd.

Angela Brennan’s colourful canvases invoke an immediate physical response in the viewer, an effect amplified by their often-immersive scale.Arranged intuitively, her humming, floating colours and forms hint at inner imaginings and dreamed worlds, encouraging states of introspection and contemplation.Containing hints of figuration like planet forms and landscapes these new works radiate, encouraging us to imagine possible worlds of warmth and happiness.

This silent video features a teeming pit of sweaty teenagers in a state of seemingly beatific euphoria. While the work’s title suggests they might be experiencing some sort of religious awakening, they are simply being recorded in the mosh pit of a rock concert. Rapture recalls our experiences of immediate, ephemeral, youthful pleasure. Made over ten years ago in a pre-COVID world where gathering with others didn’t carry the same risk it does now lends the work an unexpected sense of nostalgia and even melancholy.

The influence of Te Atawhai-Scott’s background in photography is evident in Face of God, which is peppered with photographs of her family and friends.Loosely taking the form of a train journey (from Wellington to Palmerston North) as a point of departure, the work is a tender musing on spirituality, the complexities of family relationships and the passage of time. Te Atawhai-Scott presents us with multigenerational musings on mortality - just as happiness is fundamentally transient, so too are our lives.

Utilising mantras and phrases lifted from mindfulness meditation, corporate training, cognitive therapy, online dating and job applications, Happiness teems with aspirational optimism and projections of our best selves, all set to a calming, new age soundtrack. The sporadic, floating texts increase in volume and frequency as the video progresses, building into an overwhelming barrage of aspirational thinking, the antithesis of the calm ‘quietness’ these wellness strategies promote.

Gwenneth Blitner’s landscape paintings often feature the animals, hills, flowers, and billabongs surrounding the small community of Ngukkur in South East Arnhem Land where she has lived her whole life. Blitner grew up on Roper Mission and was educated at the Bush School, working for many years at the local council before leaving to begin painting at Ngukkur Art Centre full time. Often made while listening to upbeat pop music, Blitner’s paintings convey the artist’s deep love of colour and Country. At the start of each session Blitner often closes her eyes. She says, “I like to think about this place and paint more.”

Spanning painting, poetry and curatorial practice, Jemi Gale’s work deals with emotional responses to overwhelming events. These simultaneously bold and delicate paintings reveal a state of vulnerability, projecting ideal futures and possible realties upon haunted pasts.Human connection is key to Gale’s life and work. The social importance of collaboration is reflected here in canvases created with fellow artists and friends that assemble the physical and emotional detritus of everyday life.

A self-described bogan teen goth who never went to art school, Matthew Harris is an avid consumer of popular culture whose practice rejects the hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art.His work is often described as kitsch or camp but for the artist these observations are superficial. While Harris’s self-described ‘stupid colourful paintings’ undoubtedly celebrate ‘bad’ painting and scandalous forms of naughtiness, they also contain private, deeply embedded meanings which take the concept of smiling in the face of adversity to its extreme.

Matila-Smith sees the bedroom as a performative space. In it, she presents intimate, personal snapshots of her face and body in extreme close-up, film still style. A companion piece to the artist’s moving image portrait 7 minutes in Heaven on MAMA’s outdoor screen, I’m Having Such a Nice Time, I Don’t Wanna Ruin It further exploits the notions of intimacy and romance attached to this most personal of spaces. In Matila-Smith’s work the line between autobiography and performance is blurred - her revelations are made to be seen by others. By presenting tender portraits and interior thoughts she encourages us to see strength in vulnerability.

Much of Matila-Smith’s work happens in the bedroom, in bed. She utilises this intimate space to challenge the boundaries of public and private. In exhibiting the personal and private in public spaces like MAMA’s outdoor screen, the artist addresses wider societal fears of exposing oneself, particularly in relation to the anxieties and existential crises associated with our capacity as romantic partners. This work is accompanied by a suite of corresponding banners installed in MAMA’s atrium. In them, the artist’s body is fragmented into close-up ‘film stills’ accompanied by stream of consciousness texts musing on love and being loved.

Working predominantly in sculpture, these jewel-like gouaches are a relatively new addition to Nakamura’s practice and speak directly to the artist’s experience as a new mother.Referencing shunga (Japanese erotic prints made between the 17th and 19th centuries), these unexpected portraits of motherhood are infused with female spirituality and sexuality. Each painted with the same emoji-like expression (a means of deflecting an objectifying gaze) Nakamura’s cheery mummies are naked, vulnerable, triumphant and - sexy; challenging the presumption that motherhood and sexuality are mutually exclusive.

While Tanuvasa’s practice is hard to pin down - spanning wall drawings, photography and installation - mark making lies at its core. For her, the very act of making provides a moment of release amidst the flurry of everyday life. Tanuvasa often works in response to her immediate environment and for this new commission researched images of MAMA and its surrounding landscape, drawing on the colours and forms of Wiradjuri country while also reflecting on her own sense of place in Panmure, Tamaki Makaurau. The work’s grid format encourages multiple readings, inspiring a conversation around capturing a connection to place through marks and colour.

Yvonne Todd has always drawn, predominantly for enjoyment but also to make preparatory sketches for her photographs. Because the artist’s drawings were never largely intended to be seen beyond her visual diaries, they are whimsical and unlaboured, offering a reprieve from the complexities of setting up a photoshoot. Last year Todd decided to exhibit some of these drawings for the first time, transforming them into letterpress prints. While the printing process has made the original sketches more robust, the joy and spontaneity they evoke remains palpable.