Marc Blake’s Alta (2016-2024) is the artist’s final exhibition as a Queenstowner, but that’s not the only reason the body of work has a potent emotional charge for him as he relocates to Bannockburn. The title, “Alta (2016-2024)” has multiple significances. It is the Latin word for “high” or “tall”, Alta Place was the street in Frankton the artist lived on. It’s also the motto of Wakatipu High School, signifying mana, taking the high road and aspiring for the best, and it is also the name of a lake in the Remarkables. It thus binds together the period Blake lived in the community, a context of place, and other associations that will become clear.

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Alta consists of 49 photographs, selected from nearly 800, taken over 8 years of a lone basketball hoop standing sentinel in Kawarau Falls Park in Frankton. The hoop is still, fixed centre of its own universe. It was a landmark for Blake on his daily dog walks, and he photographed it every day until it was removed in 2024.

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“Over time,” says the artist, “the personal fascination and connection to the hoop itself began to form. The photography became an (almost) daily rhythm and the intimate knowledge of this subject allowed for me to recognise opportune moments and nuance in the scene. It wasn’t until only recently that I came to realise the photographs had become their own substantial project in themselves and also one of a kind of local, historical and personal significance, if in a mostly symbolic manner. When I moved to QT at the start of 2015, it felt like the end of the world - both literally and in terms of my separation from the wider art world. Something that inevitably spurred me on to start a number of curatorial and gallery projects here to initially unite the local artists and subsequently look to the wider art world in terms of bringing critically focussed artists in from elsewhere - most lately through Superpartner in Arrowtown that I co-run with Derrick Cherrie.”

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The result encompasses a variety of conceptual frameworks. On one level it’s a kind of durational work, a longitudinal study of how a pocket of a community changes over nearly a decade. It can be interpreted as a photojournalism exercise in documentary. It has an affinity with Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and the photographic studies of industrial infrastructure by Hilla and Bernd Becher, and the atmospherically transformative photographs by Fiona Amundsen of mundane empty spaces. The space of the park and the significance of the hoop to the community already attach a certain set of meanings and signifiers.

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“The park,” says Blake, “has four entrances in this small neighbourhood and our house was two doors up the road. It’s an idyllic, peaceful, safe, family neighbourhood. I believe the basketball court has been there since the late 80s, frequently used by local kids. But while there may not be much to do in Frankton proper, the kids have an almost infinite number of opportunities for outdoor activities year round. The park is mainly young children and mums, day to day, very relaxed, family oriented.”

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Blake’s process in creating this work is intimately entangled with a narrative of place and social change. He acknowledges the possible reference to American artist Richard Prince’s Upstate series of photographs from the 1990s which documented upstate New York as a shabby suburban lifestyle and community distinct from urban glamour and sophistication of New York City as the imperial centre of the international art world. One of these images notably makes use of a basketball hoop.

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“Unlike Prince’s works however,” says Blake, “which reveal an America in decline, Queenstown is seemingly on the constant ascent. Property values have nearly tripled in the past 10 years. It is endlessly desirable for investors and forms part of the fastest growing region in the country.  The ‘gold rush mentality’ imbued in the place. My work is not so much the lament of degradation, but more the manner in which the landscape here is endlessly commercialised in every way from tourism to adventure sport, to real estate, to art.”

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“Taking down an old hoop and replacing it with a shiny new one,” he says, “while an improvement to the vast majority, is also somewhat symbolic of the accelerating shift societally and economically here.

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Duchamp showed that anything could be art. Joseph Beuys showed that anyone could be an artist. Andy Warhol showed that art was for everyone and entirely in the eye of the beholder. And Frank Stella told us that “what you see is what you see”. Seeing is the whole point here. There are quotidian objects that we see every day, but most people will never guess the individual meanings we apply to them, and we will never know theirs. Something of the same can be said of the way we, as individuals, react to an artwork, both as an object and as an idea.

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Within the gallery, the main body of the work is hidden behind a line of movable walls, an enigmatic delaying of the audience’s gratification. Mounted at eye-level on floor-to-ceiling poles in Te Atamira’s Whakaari gallery in imitation of a hoop’s backboard, they are subtly positioned so that only part of the exhibition can be seen at any one time from any one place, so that the viewer has to physically interact with the images by moving through space. The result is an immersion in what the artist calls a “forest” of images, which suggests the lines from Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences”:

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L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles

Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

(Man passes there through forests of symbols

Which look at him with understanding eyes.)

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“I wanted the viewer to have to consciously decide to enter the space,” says Blake. “They come in through the main door, walk down the corridor I have made towards a single hoop on the end wall. When I found the abandoned backboard, frame and pole after it was removed to make way for the new court, it was missing a rim. I decide to craft a new one with a brand new rim and seven overlapping layers of steel chain net. This layering of steel shifted the materiality of the net into something substantial and blingy, jewellery or crown like.”

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The process of putting the physical elements together reveals a sculptural play of ideas that further enhances the work. As the artist explains:

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“When I first installed this work in the studio, I was struck by the chance manner in which the two lights cast these wing-like shadows. Again, playing up a kind of religious, or metamorphosis-like connotation. I loved it, and we recreated that in the gallery. It hangs at 10ft regulation height. Once the viewer passes beneath that work, they turn the corner again into the main large gallery space. Each of the 49 images across are direct printed onto Aluminium Composite Material with UV curable ink. There is a reflective backlit quality to this method, which along with the portrait orientation also helps suggest a phone screen, which is largely what the images were taken with. Each panel is then mounted to either a white, or black aluminium pole that spans 4.5m floor to ceiling. The works are positioned equidistant throughout the entire space and rotated at varying perspectives so that there is no way to view the entire show from any singular position in the space. Viewers must physically move and choose their own path through the works, through a jumble of seasons, times, months, years. This conflation and jumbling of time echoing a sense of abstracted memory and experience. An isolation of sorts yet surrounded by echoes of the past.”

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The guest of honour is the actual hoop itself in the centre, discovered some months after its removal, and suddenly a suite of photographs becomes a fully realised installation piece, a complex index of themes: loss, community, isolation, memory, ephemerality, time, duration and history. “I stumbled across it discarded outside the local school totally by chance,” says Blake. “At that moment I knew I had to get the hoop and make the show. It lies, fallen, surrounded by memories of its life.”

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Through repeated seeing and photographing, the hoop takes on an iconic significance, like a famous landscape or a celebrity. For Blake it became the silent witness to many significant personal events in his life – the death of his brother, marriage to his partner, the birth of their son, and the intense sense of isolation experienced in the Covid lockdown.

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“For me,” says Blake, “the significance became one of gradually viewing the hoop as a kind to totemic, sentinel like figure.  One that silently observed the daily banality and minutiae and accelerating change in the local region. A universal symbol that has both commonality as well as distinct regional social/cultural differences and associations around the globe. The hoop itself seemed permanent, if weathered and patinaed, standing through the often harsh weather etc. Until midway through 2024, when it was felled to make way for a shiny new court, one that was a significant council investment and no doubt a far superior basketball experience, but for me, lost the old school, ‘shitty’ charm of the original hoop. The orientation of the court shifted too, which threw the alignment.”

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Paradoxically, Blake doesn’t consider himself a photographer per se. “I don’t consider myself a photographer in the way I would classify myself as an artist,” he says. “It’s just always been there in everything I have done.” The project “began initially as source material for paintings. The way the geometric form floated in front of the mountains reminded me of both McCahon’s Tau Cross and the way Peter Doig inversely places geometric forms with the organic landscape forming the “frame” around it. This urban/indoor form juxtaposed against the Remarkables was so painterly to me.”

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For such a low tech subject as a rather decrepit basketball hoop, technology is one of the significant stimuli to the project. The casual availability of advanced cameras on mobile phones allows for the spontaneity and improvisational nature of the work. Visual contexts and conditions can be responded to off the cuff which is very relatable to general human experience.

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“I lived in Japan after Uni from 2002 to 2006,” says Blake. “At that time, I saw the first ‘real’ smartphone with a good camera. I instantly knew everything was about to change. No longer did we need to consciously decide to take a camera with us - it was always from that moment in my pocket. Photography for me embraces that. A record of life as it unfolds. Sometimes that becomes art. In 2006 I put on a show in Auckland of my cellphone photos from Japan. No one could believe they’d been done with a phone. I don't think that made them particularly special as works, but that moment stands out. Technology is always fundamental to my work, including painting.”

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The exhibition of “Alta (2016-2024)”  concludes an era, and a project of this length allows for the artist to look back on what they have learned about a place and themselves:

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“The project as a whole,” Blake says, “and showing it at Te Atamira now forms a full circle for me as we move in a couple of weeks. It wraps not only that entire decade but also allowed me to give a sending off to the hoop and an ode to the neighbourhood, to consider the landscape here (overwhelmingly common and commercialised) as no other artist had. Change is inevitable. We can just hope it’s going to all work out.”

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