[PRETTY
PICTURA] with New Zealand Company
New Zealand with its distinctive atmospheres and skies, its forests
of varied verdure, its many hued mountains, its play of waters in rivers
and on rocky coasts and on smooth beaches
1
A tourist brochures idyllic description of a New Zealand landscape!
In the 1800s an England- based colonisation company, the New Zealand
Company, instructed artists like Charles Heaphy to paint a pretty
picture of New Zealand. But New Zealand was hardly as accommodating
as the pictures suggested. Expecting to find arable farmland, settlers
discovered to their dismay cliffs and bushy gullies. It would take work
to convert this wilderness into an Eden. 2
The screen saver series [PRETTY PICTURA] investigates this Eden, appropriating
four prominent pretty pop New Zealand landscape paintings which have a
stylistic quality similar to vector aesthetics used on the web. Parts
of the paintings are digitally separated so as to animate [by code] events
that occur throughout the everlasting panning landscape. An accompanying
soundtrack [looped] adds a paradisiacal ambience.
[PRETTY PICTURA] addresses the issue of surface [the pretty landscape]
with an underlining cynicism [repetition of the same, again and again].
Over time the animated passive works become rather dull and ridiculous
as they continuously loop on the screen until the end user decides no
more.
1. L. S. Fanning, ed. New Zealand Today, Dunedin, New Zealand, 1925, p.315.
2. R. Leonard, Headlands, MCA, Sydney, 1992, p.161.
[PRETTY PICTURA] is
an Sean Kerr project for Korea Web Art
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