MICHAEL LETT

Michael Parekowhai
The Past in the Present
2013 sculptural installation: bronze and carpet, 7800m x 300mm

A perceptual act is never isolated; it is only the most recent phase of a stream of innumerable similar acts, performed in the past and surviving in memory. Similarly, the experiences of the present, stored and amalgamated with the yield of the past, preconditions the percepts of the future.

Visitors to The Past in the Present may enter the fair booth to look at the installation, interact with the chairs and the golf balls, effortlessly recall encounters with such things, and find themselves unable to settle on a single context for the collision of objects before them.

The carpet provides a textual experience, like walking on moss. With imagination, its vintage design could be a celestial scene from a fresco. The bronze golf balls scattered across it would be illuminated stars in the sky. You can kick them round the booth or pick them up to feel their weight.

The polished and reflective table might function as a make-do card table. The chairs are based on 1970s school chairs – look closely and they reveal organic characteristics, as though they are quadrupeds. Visitors can sit on them and become objects in the installation, displayed upon bronze plinths.

A bronze coffee cup holder sits on the table and bronze takeaway coffee lids are nailed to the walls. A single table leg balances a golf ball on its tip – a sketch of a lamp or maybe an idea, hovering on the edge of the installation.

An imaginative experience or derivative nostalgia? The golf balls could be part of a game the viewers have interrupted or maybe balls for putting practice. The coffee lids should probably be in a bin but they’re displayed like miniature paintings. Stepping into The Past in the Present viewers may interpret the space without truly knowing where they stand and what it all means.