The Possibilities of identity

In her latest body of work, the painter Delicia Sampero continues her inquiry into the nature of identity, with particular focus on the relationship between individual and community.

Portraits and text panels combine in a sweeping installation, dramatic in its chequerboard contrast.  But who are these people?  Why has the artist brought them together?  As one by one we recognise the faces and read the words, it’s evident that we’re looking at a community which transcends its current physical juxtaposition.

These individuals are linked by their connection to Sampero, by their various relationships to each other, their participation in creative work, and, ultimately, by their geographical affiliation.  Although the portraits offer little external information about their subjects, the penumbra which surrounds them is part pohutukawa blush, part the dull red glow of fire, the when-not-if volcanic geology of New Zealand.

ID card, driver’s licence, passport:  the isolated face as an official expression of identity is familiar to us all.  Though Sampero’s portraits are benign, the subjects free to engage our gaze or look away, there’s something gritty in the texture and tones, something which makes the counterpoint of portrait and text panel read like a passport splayed open for inspection.

Sampero makes the point that “in notions of nationhood…the individual person is always hidden.”  But what can a document of national identity really say about you?  An open passport isn’t an open book, it’s a piece of code, a key which lets you in - and sometimes keeps you out.

This tension of the passport as a force of dark and light, is stamped home in the inky lines of the New Zealand coat of arms, laid like moko across the serene features of Ani O’Neill and Sofia Tekela-Smith.

As this work by Sampero suggests, a vital community is interwoven but open-ended, drawing on a connectivity which renews while it reinforces.  There’s room for many ways of being, and belonging; marks of national identity and those of cultural affirmation needn’t be mutually exclusive.

The panels of text serve to link formal identification with likeness, but, more importantly, also provide us with glimpses of self, something a passport should never attempt.  Trying  to pin the myriad expressions of one’s identity to the page is an impossible, even destructive task;  better the fragment, the surfacing memory, even the blank slate, not empty, but full of possibilities.

One hopes that Sampero will have the opportunity to explore further, expanding and reconfiguring this installation, mediating in different ways between text and image;  for this body of work deserves to be as fluid and as open-ended as the community it presents.

 

Rigel Sorzano

Auckland

19 September 2006