Thursday, August 12, 2010

To the victor the spoils

Wow! What’s in that giant gift-wrapped parcel on the Wellington waterfront? It’s Bill Hammond's painting Traffic Cop Bay. According to the description on Te Papa's web site we're looking at “an ambiguous space filled with unlikely objects and land masses, the bird figures perform various activities which are both familiar and utterly foreign." No surprise then to find it being used to promote Wellington "spoiling itself". While it's hard to tell why the woman who pulled the ribbon to reveal the pic took the wrapping indoors with her, she certainly put on her best face when she found out that there was a painting and not a big stone wall inside the package.