Heather Straka: Dreams, Decadence and Discovery
Edgy and seductive, enigmatic and theatrical, New Zealand artist Heather Straka’s art stimulates both the eyes and the imagination. Andrew Wood looks back at a career exploring all manners of subversion and diversity, and forward to an extraordinary immersive artistic experience.
Image credit: Heather Straka, Semisi Bro, 2021, archival pigment prints on Photorag Ultrasmooth paper. Courtesy the artist and SCAPE Public Art, Christchurch
Hotels have always been strange, liminal places where odd characters, often trying to pass themselves off as something other than they are, collide together. It’s a curious atmosphere, and one which New Zealand artist Heather Straka exploits in a theatrical new immersive art experience – Age of Discovery.
Straka attended the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland, graduating in 1994 with
a degree in sculpture before moving to France where she started to paint, following a visit to see a major René Magritte exhibition in Belgium. The historical masterpieces of Europe were formative on Straka’s sense of the grand and the dramatic. Upon her return to New Zealand in 1998 she had her first painting show, completing an MFA in film
at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts two years later.
Straka has always pushed the limits of the envelope of the outré, unafraid to explore the edges of approval. In 2005 her Paradise Lost paintings reworked the colonial portraits of Māori by colonial Bohemian-New Zealand painter Gottfried Lindauer (1839–1926). This was in reference to Straka’s adoptive father’s lineage, traced to the Bohemian settlement of Puhoi near Auckland. Straka’s rendering of aristocratic Māori as religious figures seemed to intuitively tap into Lindauer’s academic training by former members of the German Nazarene school. They also attracted controversy. Says Straka:
“Paradise Lost was inspired by historian Anne Salmond’s book The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas, new at the time, about Cook’s interactions with Pacific peoples. What I took from it was what gets lost in translation between two cultures. Every year there is hope that we can understand a little more.” ...Subscribe to read this article in full
