Erica van Zon, Frozen Moment

You’re a child in the 80s in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Odds are you’re on a road trip. Maybe all of childhood was just one really long road trip. There you were, in the backseat, indifferently seat belted. Life unspooled outside the window, showing itself in the colours of the Desert Road, or the Canterbury Plains, or the State Highway to Coromandel – colours that got inside you in subtle and sometimes violent ways. Childhood was stuffy and interminable, like that car. Its texture was either scratchy or sticky, depending on the back seats of your parents’ station wagon. It smelt like siblings – which is to say it smelt like chlorine, ice blocks, a petrol station pie.

          The wonder of Erica van Zon’s work is how it so perfectly captures both the freedom and the constraint of a journey. Backseat life goes on forever. It’s rich in boredom. And it’s so rich in the world – which just keeps on coming and coming. So many trees and small towns! Yet the view is also limited – by the frame of the car window, by the unspoken rituals of families, by mysterious adult decisions, by the weird dictates of domestic tourism. 

          The humility and playfulness of this show is its familiarity with that paradox. Caught within the glass of the moving window, that’s where the magic happens. There you are in your passive backseat, seat belted in – dreaming. Metabolising those views and textures into memory. Frozen by familiarity, frozen by ritual, frozen by a photo or a postcard…the moments crystallize, and catch, and shimmer. 

          What gets frozen? What floats to the top? For a start, the stuff the world is made of. On that idle backseat, there’s all the time to get intimate with the material of it all. Things press in and shape you. The itchy wool of the Kaiapoi car rug. The rip in the vinyl seat with the sun-degraded foam leaking out. The old Christmas decorations that frame the view from the back of the Kombi van. Part of the delight of Erica’s work is its materiality. The pouchy long stitches, like the overlapping marks felt tips make when you’re colouring in. The colours that are familiar and intimate – like those of the favourite picture book you carried with you everywhere. The cool, satisfying weight of those bugle beads that your hand already knows by heart. 

          And floating up, too, is an 80s childhood air of threat. There are still surfaces and primary colours here. But that metallic thread has the seedy glamour of a material that’s masquerading as something else. The stuff the world is made of is pressing, and it’s also full of danger. Cold war fallout. Lead in the paint. Asbestos in the roof. Splinters in the fiberglass. Amoebic meningitis in the hot pools. For heaven’s sakes don’t put your head under the water!

          What else gets frozen? Little rituals. Odd juxtapositions. Things that become distilled through repetition or obsession. Are we there yet? Bored at the car window, we look out for landmarks. The giant fibreglass fruit in Cromwell. The giant fibreglass carrot in Ohakune. The disconcerting rounded edges of a Futuro UFO house, viewed between the pines. There it is. Halfway there! Why do they speak to us, these novelty items? The objects that capture us are always too large or too small. They are out of place or unexpected. They are pretending to be something they are not. Maybe they soothe our own sense of the world not quite fitting. 

          On we go, trapped and dreaming. Erica van Zon’s works keep on going with us. Are they in the backseat, or are they at the wheel? Their energy steps lightly between adult wisdom and childhood naivety. The disruptions of scale and perspective keep volleying us those indelible moments of intimacy. A bird’s eye view of a sports field renders it diagrammatic, simple, comprehensible. A plane trundles into its expanse of pure blue sky with the chunky, completist detail of an Usborne visual encyclopaedia. These works ask us the questions we might ask an inquisitive toddler. What are you looking at? What is it made of? Why do you like it? They offer us views through several layers of glass and making. They remind us of the novelty and allure of our own talismans. They give us a UFO that is really a house. A vast water lily that is really a fountain. 

          On we go, trapped and dreaming. Beyond the window, in painstaking detail, too large to be seen at any one moment, the silken sky unfurls. 

Text by Anna Smaill