You Me Now
Set of artist booklets in response to re-visiting several buildings in Honiara built during the colonial period 1960 -1978. Funded by a National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland scholarship.
7 x A5 soft bound booklets (2011):
You Me Now (text)
Guadalcanal Club 1965
Guadalcanal Post Office 1968
Honiara Public Library 1967
King George Secondary School 1964
Publics Works Department 1961
Solomon Island High Court 1962
Special Collections, Elam Fine Arts Library, University of Auckland
You Me Now is a reference to the Pijin English term, Uminao or Iu Mi Nao. It indicates relationship and time, the incorporation of the past in the present. It could also mean Us Together Now.
This project observes the current state and usage of buildings of colonial infrastructure in Honiara. The buildings, built during the 1960s and 1970s, were of a modernist style of architecture. The work is a double looking, an attempt to “see" the mechanisms of the colonialism and what it presents now. The legacy of colonialism occupies Honiara and the physical colonial infrastructure continues to assert its presence. Not only historically, but in terms of it's complicated incorporation into the economic, political and social fabric of the Solomon Islands.
