The central plateau of the North Island embodies a history of state-driven interventions to extract value from its unstable pumice soils and harsh environment. This region has been shaped by monumental infrastructure projects: the planting of the Kaingaroa Forest, the construction of State Highway 1, the Tongariro Power Scheme, and the widespread use of superphosphates to boost soil fertility. Such projects relied heavily on prison labour, linking land transformation to systems of punitive control.
These landscapes, altered by state ambition, conceal layers of memory and violence. passthru reflects on the displacements—cultural, ecological, and economic—that these transformations left behind. Shot from within a moving car traveling between Tūrangi and Waiōuru, passthru maintains a single unbroken frame capturing the rear-view mirror and the windshield. This dual perspective juxtaposes the road behind and the sky ahead, reframing the landscape as simultaneously past and future, presence and absence.
Enclosed by various perforated screens that recall infrastructures of control—passthru places the viewer in a space of mediation where access, visibility, and authority are negotiated. In doing so, the work challenges the implied freedoms of the road and the screen, revealing to us the infrastructures that shape the landscape and perpetuate state narratives of productivity, ownership and control.
About the artist
Grant Priest is a Doctoral student at Elam School of Fine Arts in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Working within moving image, sculpture and installation, their practice has developed in response to issues of categorization, boundaries and cultural insecurity using colonial/industrial infrastructure as material manifestations of these ideas. This infrastructure includes prisons and schools as well as land, sea and air transport. Priest is interested in what cultural and societal norms this infrastructure maintains, and aims to contribute to a more complex understanding of the mechanics, histories and language of displacement.
The artist says: "My interest lies in the search for possible sites of disruption of the totalising function of recording technologies, to both reveal their subjective limits and gesture toward what is not present and what’s not represented in the images they create. In other words, my aim is to reveal aspects of the game that are in play within documentary filmmaking, but that recording technologies are incapable of articulating and can merely imply the absence of."