a.k.a. 'the beehive painter'
Some works from his recent show 'Crossing the Line'
The 2012 exhibition The Dreams of Children signalled a shift in Michael Hight’s painting practice. The black paintings had a dramatic and nocturnal quality which is extended in Crossing the Line as the new works continue Hight’s fascination with memory, archives, encyclopaedias and the surprising relations between things. Each work is like a theatrical tableau placed upon a shelf against a black backdrop for the viewer to behold. A handful of elements are juxtaposed to produce multiple effects—luminous paintwork, autobiographical threads, historical narratives, psychological judders, allegory, metaphor and so on. In contrast to Hight’s beehive paintings, these works feature landscape on a reduced scale. It is partitioned off and rattles against the things and people placed in the scene. At times, the paintings generate a sense of unease, the macabre, the unfamiliar, a visual puzzle. At other times, the effect is nostalgic, moving, deeply familiar.The exhibition, Crossing the Line, takes its title from the ceremonies ships engaged in when they crossed the Equator in the 1880s. This ceremony is featured in the exhibition’s largest painting of the same title.
Micheal Hight is a self-taught painter who has been exhibiting regularly since the late 1980s. He has a Bachelor of Social Science and undertook extensive travel through North America, Europe and North Africa in the eighties. He is most commonly associated with his realistic depictions of beehives in the New Zealand landscape, particularly in Central Otago and Canterbury.
More recent works have temporarily left behind his identifiable landscapes in favour of surreal dreamscapes within which a personal sense of real childhood innocence is evident. His use of juxtaposition, ambiguous symbols and an overwhelming sense of the dark and mysterious, together create an uncertainty in these works that is as curiously haunting as it is beautiful.
