Roebuck Jones and the Cuniculus Kid
Roebuck Jones and the Cuniculus Kid
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Artist
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Production Date
2001
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Medium
taxidermied rabbits, mixed media
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Credit
Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2002
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Accession Number
C2002/1/3.1-2
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Accession Date
22 Feb 2002
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Department
New Zealand Art
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Classification
Object
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Collection
Chartwell
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Subjects
rabbits, cowboys, handguns, holsters, personification, humor, stereotypes
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Chartwell Notes
In recent years, Parekowhai’s childhood nostalgia has transmuted into memorialism—death becoming a key theme. He got into taxidermy. Neil Keller and Craig Keller (2000) are big photographs: extreme close-ups of a stuffed rabbit’s glass eye. The images are horrific. It’s like being eyeballed by a monster rodent, except, of course, the eyes are blind. Included in his show, The Beverley Hills Gun Club, these portraits were titled after gunsmiths, conflating the shooters and the shot, hunters and quarry, predators and prey. Parekowhai extended this dialectic of fear and pity in Roebuck Jones and the Cuniculus Kid (2001). Two stuffed rabbits decked out in kids’ cowboy regalia are caught in a high-noon showdown. The piece represents an imminent duel, yet—fatalistically—the protagonists are already dead. In New Zealand, rabbits are imported pests, who are being exterminated, and yet we’ve inherited sympathetic images of bunnies as lovable and cute through English folklore. (Parekowhai grew up on Beatrix Potter, in which the farmer was always bad.) This work draws on our conflicted identifications: rabbits potentially representing both sides of the colonial conflict: villain and victim rolled into one.
- Robert Leonard, Nine Lives, ex. cat. (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 2003).
