George Baloghy: Colonial Dreaming
Baloghy has created an alternative universe based around colonial life in New Zealand. It is an ideal and beautiful universe, both mocking and nostalgic.
Like all faded memories it narrates a wistfulness for a life that never really existed, overlaid with surrealist ideas and continuous bright sunny days. The central memories are Eurocentric, a continuous historic line going back to the stone columns of Greek and Roman cultures thousands of years ago. Their appearance in the South Pacific as an outlier of Western Civilization appears odd, given that New Zealand is in the heart of Polynesia. The British Empire, long faded, has put its own distinctive stamp of religion and order on the new land. Churches and structures evolved elsewhere with scant regard for the original inhabitants. At the heart of it, this exhibition is a discussion about identity.
