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At City Gallery, we are currently presenting photographer Jono Rotman’s Mongrel Mob Portraits, featuring members of the notorious New Zealand street gang. The subject matter is contentious, even incendiary, but Rotman offers his subjects without indictment. His Mob photos were first shown last year at a dealer gallery, Auckland’s Gow Langsford Gallery, where they proved controversial. For City Gallery, co-curator Aaron Lister and I added in new Rotman images to expand on the Gow Langsford show. We were particularly keen to include Sean Wellington and Sons (2009). In this portrait, Sean turns his back to us—we see his patch, but not his face. He carries his two sons, who face us. They wear tiny Mongrel Mob shirts. It’s the sweetest and the heaviest image in the show. People see gangs as abhorrent but also see children as innocent, and it’s hard to reconcile these assumptions when you look at this picture. You realise that people are born into gangs and that the Mob is a community generations deep. While Rotman’s other portraits are about what has happened (he refers to his sitters as ‘artefacts’), Sean Wellington and Sons is about the future—what will happen. It prompts us to imagine the lives these boys will live. Jono Rotman: Mongrel Mob Portraits, City Gallery, until 14 June.

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German artist Peter Roehr died in 1968, aged just 23. During his tragically brief career, he produced a remarkable body of works employing appropriation and repetition. Bridging the preoccupations of pop and minimalism, his film montages (all 1965) repeat short excerpts of found footage: shampoo commercials, wrestlers, cars on highways, petrol-station signs. Roehr wrote: ‘I change material by repeating it unchanged. The message is the behaviour of the material in response to the frequency of its repetition.’ Holger Liebs says, ‘His contemporaries did not immediately recognise the quality of Roehr’s work. Roehr’s series, with their dogged, tautological order, were in many ways so much in step with the trends of their times—among them the aesthetics of information theory, structuralism and minimal art—that their peculiarity long remained overlooked.’ In his montages, Roehr’s generic anonymous source clips take on a new affective scale; the contingent and banal becoming definitive, monumental, even mythic. On the one hand, the montages are frustrating, suggesting that time is attenuated or stuck; on the other hand, they foreground the pleasure of sheer repetition. Peter Roehr: Film Montages, City Gallery, 16 March–27 June 2015. (Here’s Tim Carballis’s review.)

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Gunther, a rugged, loincloth-wearing male, is based on memories of a commune in the Kaipara district near my uncle and aunt’s farm. I never went there but heard the stories from my cousins. The commune encouraged a casual atmosphere where nudism was practised. One of the mothers was often naked, sunbathing on a banana lounger, her overgrown pubic area a topic of lengthy discussion among my cousins and me. Instead of consuming lollies and biscuits like normal kids, the children of the commune ate handfuls of savoury yeast from large jars and had odd names like Shanu and Cyrus. We embellished their parents’ nudity to high levels of perversity, although the boring truth was that they were gentle hippies, self-sufficient, working the land, making feijoa wine.
—Yvonne Todd
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Check out my epic Yvonne Todd exhibition Creamy Psychology at City Gallery Wellington. 6 December 2014–1 March 2015.