Tom Mackie

Born Te Awa Kairangi, Lower Hutt 1987. Lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington.

Playing with found archival material, Wellington based Mackie alters the way images are displayed in order to evoke new narratives, new possible futures, in order ” to give back to the architecture” of the space in which a work is exhibited. Mackie’s intervention more broadly draws attention to all that so often goes unseen in a gallery, layers of white paint on walls obscuring the marks indicative of an exhibition’s history: nail holes, stains, murals and scores. Mackie’s works, a hybrid of print and sculptural object, subvert museological tropes, drawing further attention to the falsity, the often vacuousness of the gallery space sans artwork.

Known for working from extensive collections accumulated over time, Mackie’s work often refers to the internet’s status as an ever-evolving archive: exploring history and in doing so, querying the way in which events are documented and subsequently remembered- In his own words: “mobilising the static”, revisiting the past; synthesising and subverting it. Visual and textual representation structures and curates the narrative of history. Mackie’s practice ultimately engages in a discourse, by challenging museological methods of display he drags our accepted notions of archive and history into a more unsettling territory.