69it down.‘JustbecauseI happentobea Samoanthey
put a tapa on the wall. It’s so cliché, you know, it’s so
offensive.’ At the reading at the Adam, the imaginary
tapa was hung next to Blue Lagoon, a portrait of a
restaurant in Anchorage, Alaska. There, too, tapa
hangs on the wall, is wrapped around napkin holders
and plastered over pillars. Tapa-inspired cloth drapes
the tables. The restaurant is popular, Tonga writes in
the exhibition’s catalogue, with the local Polynesian
community for its Hawaiian-themed menu. As the
character pulled at the imaginary cloth, invisible
on the gallery’s white walls, those reflected in the
photographs around him seemed to confuse his aim.
With travel comes translation, which we can trace
back to the Latin translatus: trans, across and latus,
carried. Amituanai has an interest in what is carried
across oceans, islands, highways and footpaths; how
those objects and traditions that travel the distance
begin a new life in that movement. Translation is an
acknowledgement of what a reader brings to a text, or
a viewer to an image: it is the process that informs the
double take.
Double Take is an apt title for this exhibition, given
that Amituanai’s career has been defined by her very
looking again: seeking to picture the extraordinary
in those moments which might otherwise pass
unexamined. In conversation with her daughter,
the artist Shiloh Amituanai, the older Amituanai
noted that this exhibition stretches both the breadth
of her career and the length of her daughter ’s life.
Shiloh appears repeatedly in her mother’s work:
as a child playing with the Lai family who are the
subject of the La Fine Del Mondo series (2009–10)
and playing cards in Line and Shiloh Playing Cards.^4
Shiloh’s work Hoodstunnaz (2019)—a hand-drawn
digital wallpaper that features images of a faceless
Jesus surrounded by megaphones, a 21st key that
reads ‘Manuia lou aso fanau!’, the back of a white
van covered in bumper stickers declaring allegiance
to Ranui 135 and a picture frame draped with lei—is
the only non-photographic piece in the exhibition.
The wallpaper, which canvases an entire wall at the
bottom of the stairs on the gallery’s first floor, gives
the photographer’s former subject her own platform
for expression. In this way it provides a link between
Amituanai’s earlier series, which are deliberately
composed, and her later work which, although still
grounded in the importance of relationships, leaves
more up to the subjects’ disposition; leaves more
to chance. Hoodstunnaz takes that premise to its
logical conclusion: there is no frame, no camera, no
photograph. The ‘village photographer’ has brought
the village to the gallery.^5
In his essay ‘The Documentary Impulse in Edith
Amituanai’s Art’, published in the exhibition’s
catalogue, Haruhiko Sameshima writes: ‘Edith is a
village photographer because she lives and raises her
family in the community where she photographs. Her
images are made primarily for the eyes and benefit
of her “people”.’^6 Walking around the gallery some
of these people become more familiar than others.
Shiloh grows up. Ioka, Amituanai’s sister-in-law
and the subject of some of her earliest work, goes(opposite) Edith Amituanai’s Double Take at the Adam Art Gallery,
Wellington, May 2019, showing SwitchHittaz preparing for Siren
Battle (2018)
(below) SHILOH AMITUANAI Hoodstunnaz—detail 2019
Hand-drawn digital wallpaper print