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Heather Straka

Heather Straka (b. 1972) is an Auckland based artist that primarily works with the mediums of painting and photography. Straka is well known as a painter that utilises a lot of detail. She often depicts cultures that are not her own which has caused controversy at times. Her work engages with themes of economic and social upheaval in interwar China, the role of women in Arabic society and Māori in relation to colonisation in New Zealand.

Education

During Secondary school Straka attended night classes studying art. Straka was accepted into Elam School of Fine Arts and she studied sculpture. She graduated with her BFA in 1994. Tutors of hers included Christine Hellyar and Greer Twiss. Once she had graduated she spent five years in France where she worked with the artist Julia Morison and learned about painting, subsequently switching to painting as her medium. After she returned to New Zealand in 2001, Straka completed her master’s degree at the University Of Canterbury School Of Fine Arts.

Artworks and Major Exhibitions

In Straka’s practice she works with contentious subject matter and questions tradition. Her series of paintings appropriating portraits of Māori chiefs by artists such as Charles Goldie, Gottfried Lindauer and colonial photographer, W.H.T. Partington were exhibited in an exhibition entitled Paradise Lost at the Jonathan Smart Gallery in 2005. Straka copied these paintings with her trade mark polished and detailed style but added new elements such as red tinged skin, tattoos, horns and halos. Depictions of Māori chiefs as Satan and as angels have recalled “the efforts of zealous missionaries who searched for godliness within Māori society.” Some of the portraits have a Sacred Heart placed on the chest of the figure. The fact that Straka did not receive permission from Iwi to paint these images caused offense and outrage. The questions that have arisen from this debate ask who owns such portraits? How can these depictions ever be reclaimed? Are these portraits true ethnographic or historic records?

In 2010 Straka exhibited her major project The Asian. For this project Straka commissioned artists in the Chinese painting village of Dafen to make 50 copies of her painting The Asian (2009). All 51 paintings were exhibited at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery with each painting have slight differences such as the hue and subtle additions of detail. The image mimics Chinese poster girls used in the 1920s and 1930s to sell products to the Chinese from the West. The project “as a whole questions notions of authenticity, originality and anonymity versus the individuality of the artist’s hand and eye.”

In 2009 Straka exhibited her show Do Not Resuscitate at the Blue Oyster Art Project Space and again at the Jonathan Smart Gallery in 2010. In this exhibition, Straka developed large format photographs that reference the Japanese concept of the ero kawaii which Andrew Paul Wood has described as “that disturbingly pedophilic hybrid of Sanryo kitschy Hello Kitty cuteness and kinderwhore Lolita coquettishness”. The exhibition comprised of a wall of individual portraits of young female Japanese, Chinese and Korean models and a tableau vivant of the same girls gathered around a blond corpse on a gurney.