The Golden Hour: Angela Tiatia

Iwas honoured to be invited by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to create a work for the 32-metre wall of their entrance court. I have always loved this space. I remember spending many visits to the gallery just standing here, marvelling and learning from the Colin McCahon that hung there.

The Golden Hour was conceived, designed, shot and built with this specific space in mind and for this specific time. Both in terms of how it relates to The Archibald, but in a larger sense to grapple with ideas that relate to the time we are all living in.

I have seen the word ‘unprecedented’ in more headlines in the last 6 months than I have in the rest of my life. But beyond Covid, there are a series of fundamental changes whose waves are all cresting at the same time: ecological, economic, social, cultural, racial and political. And rather than being separate and independent, they are chorusing together and amplifying their impacts.

These themes have been a driving force behind much of my work. It has been my means of trying to make sense of many of them, especially their impact on the disempowered. However, for this work I wanted to zoom out from these issues directly, and instead acknowledge the landscape of our time that these changes are washing over. And it felt that the golden light of dawn or dusk was the perfect setting.

The 19th-century German Idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also drew upon the metaphor of a time between night and day when he noted that, "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." I'm no philosopher, but my understanding is he was observing that we don't tend to understand a time until it is passed. We live through it, but can only make sense of it in hindsight.

With all due respect to Hegel, I'm not sure I agree. My belief is that art can help illuminate our situation and make clear the options we have in front of us while we still have them.

In The Golden Hour, the characters are burning their own portraits. This is a motif I revisit from an earlier work, The Fall, which was a 2017 Australian War Memorial commission. As part of this commission, I was resident in Singapore to study The Fall of Singapore that happened 75 years earlier. While reading through accounts of survivors I came across descriptions of how people were burning their family portraits. They did this to erase connections between them and their loved ones, so as to protect themselves from invading forces looking to persecute relatives of people they saw as dissidents.

But where this was an act of erasure of their connections to others, in this work the people are burning their own images.

I was drawn to this visual idea in response to several contemporary dynamics, but in particular the selfcannibalization of social media. That in a world where you have more control than ever of how you curate

Angela Tiatia in front of her new photographic work, The Golden Hour 2020, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

how the world sees you, rather than it being a boon for self determination, it is instead an arms race of unachievable expectations. We become commodities in the marketplace of attention and affection. And in the face of this organised self-destruction an act of turning our own images to ash seems like the most self affirming.

But clearly the work also includes references to portraiture in general, and it is worth touching on this in the context of this being shown at the same time as the Archibald Prize - not only Australia's, but one of the world's most important celebrations of portraiture. I both admire and struggle with portraiture. As I perceive it, it is intended to record a person - not only in physical appearance, but also in essence - not only what they look like, but what they are like. That's a big ask.

And it always strikes me that portraiture is an odd tool for this task. For one thing the subject is usually alone - studied in and of themselves, devoid of greater context - except the condimental visual cues of the subject's status. And yet we don't exist in a vacuum of other people. I was brought up in a culture where the collective is more important than the individual - so I struggle with the idea that we can be understood in any way that is of interest without considering those around us. So for this work I wanted the portraiture to be collective and for there to be conversations and tensions between the people and their surroundings. These tensions touch on another point of the work. Like many artists, I hope my work makes people feel something. To be moved. However, in this work I don't want to shepherd the viewer to a particular emotional response. Instead I hope everyone connects to different parts and lands on their own feelings. I want to draw the dots, but not join them. And in this work, the dots are the interactions, the points of tension between the individuals, their place, and themselves.

Thank you to Justin Paton, Isobel Parker Philip and Danielle Earp for the opportunity to create this work. And thank you to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the contribution they made that went towards its creation.