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Michael Parekōwhai Portrait of Elmer Keith No. 1 2004 c-type print, edition of 10 1250 x 1010mm PROVENANCE Private collection, Auckland. Michael Parekōwhai – Portrait of Elmer Keith No. 1 Essay by ANDREW CLARK This image is part of a series entitled The Beverly Hills Gun Club, which consists of a number of works involving taxidermy specimens of sparrows and rabbits. Some of these works take the form of close-up photographs of said specimens, all shot against the same vivid orange-red background. The crisp, immaculate nature of this photo, where each feather and glinting glass eye is captured in perfect focus, suggests an advertisement or magazine spread, as does the vividly coloured backdrop, with its sense of placeless, nervous energy. Adding to the aura of artificiality that surrounds the work is the fact that this is a photograph of another representation. The object depicted is not an animal, but a carefully prepared example of taxidermy, using the skin and feathers of a real creature to create a representative simulacrum of it, devoid of life or substance but retaining an appearance of vitality that is at once disturbing and oddly appealing. These are images that are thoroughly curated, chosen and presented as part of a coherent strategy, a completely mediated experience. But what exactly is being represented, and why? The title of the series, as well as the title of each individual photograph, has a great deal of bearing on this question. As with many of Parekōwhai's works, language plays a key role in the encoding and decoding of meaning - the image itself is only a part of the puzzle. Each rabbit and sparrow photographed has been given a name: Elmer Keith, Ed Brown, Jimmy Rae, Larry Vickers, and Lou Lombardi. These are not the type of names associated with animals, but oddly specific human names, names that suggest something about their owners. The title of the series implies that these human-sounding animals are part of the eponymous club, a cadre of heavily armed creatures hailing from a location intimately associated with wealth and privilege. A small amount of internet research reveals that some of these names belong to people who could plausibly belong to such a club: Elmer Keith was the name of an American gun enthusiast who developed a new type of ammunition for revolvers, while Ed Brown appears to be the name of a firearms manufacturer, with a possible reference to Edwin Brown, a nineteenth-century English naturalist and taxidermy collector. Jimmy Rae is more opaque, possibly referring to either an American NFL player, a Scottish footballer, or the name of a song by Canadian singer Corey Hart, although none of these solutions seems completely satisfactory. Likewise, there is a Larry Vickers who claims to be an ex-US Army Delta Force operative who works in the firearms industry as a consultant, although the more likely reference would be to the Vickers machine gun, a World War One-era firearm. Lastly, Lou Lombardi is a television actor who played an FBI agent in The Sopranos, offering a further connection to both popular and gun culture. There is an element of wry humour in ascribing these masculine, aggressive-sounding names to small, apparently inoffensive creatures such as rabbits and sparrows, more evocative of the anthropomorphic tales of Beatrix Potter than of gun-club patrons. Indeed, these animals seem as likely to have been the victims of the gun club, perverse trophies celebrating the demises of small woodland creatures. However, in the context of New Zealand's native ecosystem, species such as rabbits, sparrows, possums and deer may as well have come equipped with an arsenal of weaponry, for all the destruction their introduction has caused. These unsettling, subtly morbid portraits are equally readable as mugshots of aggressive invaders, simultaneously cataloguing their crimes and perhaps offering them a backhanded notoriety otherwise denied such lowly creatures. Other works by Parekōwhai have positioned rabbits in the guise of old west gunfighters (Roebuck Jones and the Cuniculus Kid, from 2001) or as immense presences like Japanese kaiju monsters in public spaces (Cosmo McMurty and Jim McMurty, from 2006). The photographs in The Beverly Hills Gun Club series echo these gestures, asking the viewer to reconsider their perceptions of what is "cute" and what is threatening or dangerous. Taxidermy, whether intentionally or not, often traffics in this dichotomy; small animals appeal to humans because of their large eyes, a characteristic that is associated with passivity and infancy, but our knowledge that the animal itself is dead works to undermine these warm feelings, leaving instead a sense of revulsion or morbid curiosity. Parekōwhai mobilises these conflicting responses, directing the viewer to re-examine their own perceptions of the postcolonial environment. The positioning of these European-sounding names behind the visages of invasive pest species speaks eloquently about the colonial history of New Zealand, a topic itself buried beneath layers of guilt, political narrative, wilful ignorance and historical revisionism. Parekōwhai offers a reminder that the British colonial project was a multifaceted, aggressive operation, seeking to elide or eradicate both the people and the ecology of colonised places. The ubiquity of introduced species such as rabbits and sparrows, and the extent to which they are considered normal, almost invisible parts of New Zealand's landscape, shows how pervasive colonialism is as an ecological and cultural force. The reference to Beverly Hills adds an additional layer of meaning to the work, suggesting that the multinational nature of American popular culture represents itself a further wave of colonisation.