Artist Marc Blake was out walking the dog when he saw the hoop. An average basketball hoop by anyone’s standards. Suburban park, bit ragged, nothing special. But to Blake, the chance encounter with this hoop was something of a turning point, as this seemingly ordinary object would begin to occupy his creative process, then disappear.

‍

Installed at Te Atamira, Alta (2016–2024) is an immersive photographic installation of a solitary basketball hoop – the mythical hoop of this body of work – situated in a small park near the artist’s home in the suburb of Frankton, Queenstown. A distillation of some 800 images shot over an eight year period, a strong formal vocabulary runs through the series. Stark and minimal, each of the colour photographs presents the same basketball hoop and its surrounds but shot from a numerous angles. Many were taken with the artist’s phone, while more dramatic weather conditions prompted a return with his DSLR. Rather than a depiction of place, Alta (2016–2024)  is better understood as a reflection of how the artist related to and thought about the landscape he moved through daily. Susan Sontag wrote in her celebrated essay On Photography that “photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe” and this is the heart of Blake’s project. Celebrating the ubiquitous and the overlooked, while also exploring its role within the inevitability of urban change, he recasts the basketball hoop from neglected suburban detail to silent witness of its neighbourhood and community.

‍

The exhibition’s entrance moves the viewer down a corridor, where a new basketball hoop hangs, its pristine glossy powder coated rim a world away from the hero of Blake’s project. The net is formed from seven overlapping layers of braided metal chain offering an aesthetic that is both punk and oddly elegant. Strategically lit, the chain forms a shadow not unlike angel wings on the wall behind, setting a tone of memorial and quite literally foreshadowing what is to come. Moving into the exhibitions forty nine images are intentionally set at angles and displayed on a forest of metal poles that reach from floor to ceiling. The exhibition must be navigated as a maze yet it is still not possible to see or understand all of the images at once, compounding a sense of disorientation, dislocation and the passing of seasons. Toward the rear of the gallery the basketball hoop’s original weather beaten pole and backing board rest on the gallery floor akin to a fallen solider, adorned with the remnants of torn yellow hazard tape but without its rim.

‍

An artist whose practice ranges across multiple mediums, Blake has come to this subject not so much as a photographer, but rather as a critic, and an observer of culture and of change. At first glance, many of the images seem empty and unremarkable. The setting is suggestive of but strangely without people, except in two images where we see the shadow of Blake and his young son, and another of a dog. As with many corners of Queenstown, perhaps the region’s most iconic feature forms an unwitting backdrop in a handful of images. Caught behind the hoop is Kawarau Maunga/ The Remarkables mountain range thick with snow on a postcard perfect bluebird day. However, more often it is obscured completely – hidden in heavy cloud, winter gloom, the hoop photographed from behind, tree shots, or the single frame of the artist’s dog peeing on a covid-era public distancing sign.

‍

After all, it is a bold move to take on the subject of landscape in this part of the world. Nestled on a lake under the shadow of a mountain chain known quite accurately as The Remarkables, the environment of Tāhuna Queenstown is internationally celebrated for its natural beauty. This is region is flooded with landscape photographers. Here the landscape is endlessly commercialised and an entire genre of souvenirs-of-place is readily available, from the high-end vast and glossy images with immaculate production values (and prices to match) to weekend enthusiasts out to catch the first turning of the leaves or flake of snow. Blake’s images, however, are almost anti-tourist shots, sitting on the cusp of sublime and bleakly generic. And there’s the rub, the Queenstown paradox if you like. The region’s environment has been celebrated, promoted and monetised to the point where everyone wants to live here. While unprecedented growth makes Queenstown-Lakes the fastest growing region in the country, its white hot property market and luxury boutiques hide another story. The essential infrastructure is shaky, there’s a critical housing shortage and the desire to live in one of Aotearoa’s most beautiful landscapes has made owning property – or sometimes just paying the rent – unaffordable to many. Blake has been toying with the emotional qualities of landscape across a multitude of mediums throughout his career. He’s making work in one of the most celebrated regions for natural beauty in the world, but enormous views of picturesque lakes, snow capped alpine ranges, and glacier-fed rivers don’t interest him. Instead his focus is a dilapidated basketball hoop in a forgotten suburban pocket park as far from the glamour of Queenstown’s luxury market as possible.

‍

Contemporary artists have a habit of doing one of two things: taking something unfamiliar and presenting it in a way that becomes understandable, or taking something familiar and delivering it back to us in a way that makes us look again at the thing we thought we knew. We can never see what used to be familiar in the same way again. The photographs that make up Marc Blake’s Alta series do exactly this. In this body of work the ubiquitous basketball hoop and landscape it sits within become a signifier for the artist’s thinking through and critical engagement with his home town. Blake offers a knowing nod to aspects of American artist Richard Prince’s Upstate series here , but while both photographic series by these two artists reference a similar motif it is the sense of dislocation running through each that offers the best connection. Both artists had their own intentional move away from urban centres and hubs of artistic production to smaller towns but, while we have the sense Prince found this freeing, we feel Blake’s anxiety at the move. Intriguingly, Prince’s images show an America in decline while the trajectory of Blake’s instead reflect a neighbourhood in relentless commercial ascension.

‍

While leaving space for and inviting the unfamiliar is common practice for artists, so is the ability to see the world slightly awry, interrogate the familiarity of place and remark upon objects and situations in their immediate environment with unlikely connections or criticality. Regularly visiting the same suburban park and photographing a banal detail of his everyday environment Blake has made the ordinary extraordinary.  What resulted forms an engaged, imaginative, and tender visual love poem to this everyday object, changing urban environment, and – as it turns out – Blake’s former home.

‍

Kelly Carmichael

April 2025

‍

Image: Marc Blake, "Friday, 22 July 2016 at 8:58 AM”, UV curable ink on Dibond aluminium, 594 x 420mm