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BLOG POST 1 – OUTCAST by Jasmine Togo-Risby and John Vea
Gus Fisher Gallery, Tamaki Kaurau/Auckland. October 2023

I went to a talanoa at the Gus Fisher Gallery soon after arriving in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The exhibition ‘Outcast’ was a collaboration between artists Jasmine Togo-Brisby and John Vea and took in histories of labour spanning the Pacific slave trade in the nineteenth century up to the present with the Recognised Seasonal Employment (RSE) Scheme that brings Moana workers to Aotearoa/New Zealand.

One of the main materials was plaster. On entering the gallery you saw a large circular floor installation made of plaster casts that mirrored the stained glass dome in the ceiling above. This was Togo-Risby’s work Hold. The centrepiece was modelled on the rosettes we see on moulded ceilings in old buildings across Australasia from the turn of last century. Branching out from that were two circles of plaster casts of tam-tam drums – the colloquial name for the large vertical wooden slit drums from Vanuatu – the outer ones slightly larger.

Tam tams are immediately recognisable as common tourist souvenirs and almost all Oceanic cultures have some version of this long, slim, horizontal type of slit drum. But Ni-Vanuatu drums have carved representations of figures at the top which could be ancestors, or describe a particular hut’s lineage, or chief. Togo-Risby’s casts also look a bit like dolls, the faces clearly visible; in a previous work, the casts were laid out tightly side by side, ‘in the mode of a slave ship’.

In the late nineteenth century, Togo-Risby’s great-great-grandmother was taken to work as a housemaid in Sydney for the Wunderlichs, the Australian family who pioneered these moulded ceilings. Wunderlich pressed ceilings are now prized heritage items. Born in Murwillumbah and raised in Queensland, of South Sea Islander heritage, Togo-Risby’s ancestral enquiries inevitably led to the sugar industry, powered mostly by the unpaid or exploitatively cheap labour of South Sea Islanders. CSR (Colonial Sugar Refinery) is still Australia’s largest sugar producer.

What I didn’t know was that CSR also produces plaster.

In the long gallery to the left, four crates were stacked with casts of taro. The taro, slightly larger than life, were also laid out individually across the floor. Vea’s Cargo has had other iterations: he spoke in the talanoa of originally making the taro casts with paper then one day by chance, some traffic cones were outside the place he was working, and he took one and he took one into the workshop, cut it down, and found an ideal mould, a seam in the cone imparting a line to the cast that resembles the place where the taro’s husk is peeled. I don’t think Vea knew about CSR’s manufacturing of plaster, and the artists seemed to develop their use of plaster independently. Vea was born in Aotearoa of Tongan heritage. In the talanoa, Jasmine talked excitedly about how she’d nominated Vea as her most ideal collaborator, and this room showed them in beautiful tune with one another.

Vea’s crates were first made in 2008, and these four have scrawled on them FIJI, TONGA, SAMOA, SOLOMON ISLANDS. The suggestion of cargo is clear but the trade of taro goes way back before European colonisation, and the vegetable retains precious associations. Laid out on their bases in a grid, at different angles, all these meanings were effortlessly pointed to. Behind was a sort of tapa by Togo-Risby called Monopoly that hung high on the back wall, training down across the floor to meet Vea’s installation. The Gus Fisher is an old art deco building whose dome is maintained to shining perfection as are the parquet floors, and within the long gleaming elegance of the galleries, these refined, trenchant, plaster installations created arresting contrasts.

Vea also made t-shirts with palm trees and South Sea printed in red beneath, and another with the words Ngāue Faingata’a which means ‘brutal labour’ in Tongan. But perhaps the most powerful of his works was an installation in the right-hand gallery called Section 69ZD Employment Relations Act which replicated the recreational spaces allotted to Moana workers. Cheap plastic tables and chairs, posters on the walls showing touristy Pacific beach scenes. Tinned foods like Tai-yo, instant coffee and a small TV that I managed to accidentally switch off. Banal, dreary, confined, a space in which you could imagine the weary workers sweating in the tropical heat. Chinks of reality appeared in the form of racist newspaper clippings. On the idyllic posters, quotes from the region’s great philosophers such as Epeli Hau’ofa and Teresia Teaiwa temper the ugly desperation. I think I broke into the installation, because you weren’t supposed to access it except for 15 minute intervals at 10.30am, 12pm and 3pm, mimicking the time workers have for breaks. Vea has actually worked in a factory in similar conditions. The talanoa migrated in here for its second part, and I felt less guilty about breaching the installation and breaking the TV.

Togo-Risby’s Monopoly, was a Nemasiste, a form of tapa made in Vanuatu. The scent of sugar – cloying, intoxicating – hung around it. The artist talked about how she’d been given loads of sugar bags in 2016 by a friend who worked at the Sanitarium factory, and for years didn’t know what to do with them. Contemporary sugar bags contain thin layers of plastic, so when Togo-Risby and her team flattened, beat and adhered the bags in the manner of making a tapa, the result was this long sheeny expanse with the dark blue CSR logos in blurred print along the edge. Truly my mind was blown by that nexus between plaster and sugar. The sort of happenstance where meaning, history and fabrication are in uncanny sync, as with Vea’s traffic cone moulds to create taro cargo.

How wonderful to see two artists in deep conversation with one another, their works truly integrated, not just placed next to one another in the gallery. I walked out of the exhibition on a high, then ran into a huge pro-Palestine rally on Queen Street, which maintained me. Then, I tested positive for Covid. About two weeks later, Gus Fisher posted that there’d ‘been an incident’ in the gallery, and the exhibition had to close early.