Memorialist of the Migrant Odyssey

Andy Leleisi’uao Kamoan Mine TSB Wallace Arts Centre Pah Homestead, Auckland 1 May–14 July, curated by Ben Bergman

At night, the golden arches of McDonald’s great M glow over the flatlands of Mangere Central and its studded navel the Mangere Town Centre, where ghosts of moonwalking hip-hop kids of the 1980s still linger. Mangere is the suburb in which Andy Leleisi’uao grew up, and it’s the neighbourhood he still calls home. Just along the motorway, across the Onehunga Bridge, in Hillsborough, is the Pah Homestead, where the survey exhibition Kamoan Mine, curated by Ben Bergman, displays key works made by Leleisi’uao between 1995 and 2019. Andy Leleisi’uao, a polemical, idiosyncratic talent, possessing prodigious graphic gifts, emerged out of Mangere as part of a new wave of significant New Zealand artists of Pacific Island heritage in the mid-1990s. An outstanding art student at Mangere College in the 1980s, he left high school early to help pay the family house mortgage, and got a job in a factory.

As a big exhibition shoehorned into four or five rooms, and jostled up against assorted bric-a-brac in the Pah Homestead foyer, is something of a higgledy-piggledy jumble, but nonetheless it serves as an impressive testament to the potency and fecundity of Leleisi’uao’s production across a variety of media. Paintings, drawings and sculptures are hung or grouped in series and thematic clusters to establish the persistence of this artist’s obsessions and central concerns. In sum, it is an encyclopedic display