Send off for a lonely basketball hoop

Explore memory, place and change in Alta (2016-2024). It’s an immersive exhibition by Marc Blake now on at Te Atamira, featuring eight years of photographs centered on a solitary basketball hoop in Kawarau Falls Park. The dreamlike installation invites reflection on memory, isolation and transformation.

Blake is one of the curators of Superpartner gallery in Arrowtown and has recently made the decision to move out Queenstown to Bannockburn. This exhibition is an ode to the lonely basketball hoop he would see on his daily walks from his home. Over the eight years he captured almost 800 photos of the hoop, showcasing a range of different backdrops of the Remarkables – from snow to sunshine and everything in between. 49 images have been printed on aluminium panels and each one is mounted on a black floor-to-ceiling pole.

“I love the way it juxtaposed the Remarakables behind it, and the minimal design of it, in a way, would catch the light at certain times,” Blake says. “I’d just snap it, not really thinking too much – it didn’t start out as an art project, it was more like source material for paintings. Gradually over time it started to become a substantial thing on its own.

“I started to realise the different ways you could pile meaning on it and how it could start to suggest ways of describing the changes going on around the neighbourhood and in Queenstown in general, doing that through the shifting weather and seasons and time, and all that, then conflating them all together, so it all jumbled, as memory does.”

It wasn’t until recently that Blake decided the photographs were a project on their own. He started thinking of ways to install the show that would convey the meanings behind it all. Through the installation, Blake wanted viewers to navigate a forest of jumbled, disorientating images, which mirror the confusion and isolation that memory and often change evoke.

“You can’t see the whole show from any single viewpoint, and it kind of forces you to navigate through it and concentrate on each image at once. Then in the middle of that is the original hoop itself, which is lying across the gallery floor.”

Through a series of interesting events, not only did the hoop get removed not long before Blake decided to move out of Queenstown, but he managed to stumble across it at a school, who weren’t using it, and so was able to take it for the exhibition. Two new hoops have been installed now, but they don’t have quite the same charm as the original.

“They’ve shifted the orientation of it, too, so they don’t really back against the mountains in the same way. I lost the connection to the original in a way. It was a little bit sad in a sense because it felt like a metaphor for everything in Queenstown, which just gets knocked down and a new one put up, and we slowly start to lose a little bit of the soul, of the history of a place in a way.”

The exhibition has sparked an array of different responses from crying to smiles. With the hoop lying in the middle of all these images, it can feel like a memorial for it at times. Blake says that while the tone is contemplative and solemn, there’s also a quiet humour in knowing that this journey ultimately revolves around something as simple as a basketball hoop.

“I wanted the actual imagery itself to be very accessible to anyone, so you can appreciate the exhibition on any level. Sometimes contemporary art can be a bit alienating to the audience, but because it was so much from the neighbourhood and almost an homage to my time there, I wanted everybody, regardless of their background, to be able to walk in and go ‘I know that place’ or ‘that feels cool to see where I’m from presented in a new way in an art context. And to show people that some of the best art, for me, just shows the everyday presented in a new way, which is hopefully what I’ve done,” Blake says.

Mark Blake’s exhibition Alta (2016-2024) will be on show at Te Atamira until Sunday, 4 May. The exhibition is free, so you can pop by and explore when they’re open. Head to teatamira.com for more information.