Tag: reviews

Shot on 35mm film, Mark Howden’s Sun is Through draws inspiration from the remoteness and grandeur of the New Zealand landscape and from the allure of aerial photography.

Originally filmed in 2000 for a thesis project that focused on the concept of multi-site audio-visual installation art. Titled sub.ssi — sub as in under, and ssi an acronym for “site specific installation”. The film footage was compiled with music as a “soundtracks album” and was exhibited simultaneously at three different locations. The main event was at an aircraft hangar at Ardmore Aerodrome, Auckland, NZ (where the Cessna aeroplane used for the project was housed), it was also telecast on Triangle Television in Grey Lynn, and installed as screen art at Auckland University of Technology’s exhibition space. For the event, Mark chartered a bus that picked the audience up from designated bus stops in downtown Auckland and carried them to and from the aircraft hangar venue.

Fast-forward to 2025, the film footage has been updated and recontextualised with this new soundtrack from Mark’s Karaka Sound Studio for the Dreams EP.

The film footage was shot from a Cessna aeroplane over several remote locations in the North Island of New Zealand — from Lake Waikaremoana to Lake Taupo, crossing the Waikato north to Manakau Heads and up the West Coast of the North Island to Ninety Mile Beach, where we landed and drove up the sand to the Northernmost point (Tiriparepa/Scott Point).

“I wanted to create a style of film that situated itself somewhere between documentary and ethnographic film, music videos, and multimedia installation art. The project was site-specific in the sense that it played on the idea that, depending on where you showed the work determined how a viewer interpreted it. So, at an aircraft hangar, it was a creative happening-type show with the footage being projected onto the bodies of aeroplanes and the music being played over loudspeakers, on Triangle Television it functioned as a series of music videos, and at AUT it was contemplated as an audio-visual screen art installation. Now with the additional factor of time, 25 years to be specific, the recontextualisation gives the work a subsequent meaning. While photographing the landscape, I had constant awareness that the subject I was involved with would inevitably change, much would disappear, and what I was filming was a moment in time for posterity. Working with this footage now evokes this concept for the Dreams EP, literally what I was working with is from another reality and is now a dream”.