Delicia Sampero - I AM
The Possibilities of Identity

Installation at NZ Portrait Gallery in Wellington

TJ MCNAMARA FROM THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD WROTE

" ... the paintings are consistently successful in capturing a likeness combined with a certain degree of idealisation.

Unity is conferred by the way the heads are all back -lit and the hair is consistently livened with dashes of red that suggest both blood and volcanic activity.

A special feature is the overpainting of the faces with the New Zealand coat of arms. This gives the appearance of a moko in some cases and certainly establishes a sense of Aotearoa as a home of these people.

There are over 50 personalities here and together they have a real sense of community.

Galleries of prominent locals have been attempted before but never on this scale or as successfully."

Sampero's ambitious project brings an entire community together in one place. the installation is a veritable who's who of the contemporary visual and performing arts community including painters, poets, dancers , musicians and sculptors.

Some of the artists include John Pule, Ani O'Neil, Dick Frizzell, Albert Wendt, Fatu Feu'u, Richard Lewer, Sofia Tekela-Smith, Martin Poppelwell, Jan Nigro, Shigeyuki Kihara, John Ioane, Marti Friedlander, Lemi Ponifasio, Richard Nunns, to name but a few.

Many sitters portrayed have also given a personal statement relating to the notion of identity. These statements, painted on seperate panels, are arranged with the portraits in a chessboard type pattern. Whether they are immigrants like the artist herself, fifth generation kiwis, or tangata whenua , each artist offers his or her own personal insights into their experience of NZ culture. Together , the text and faces create a woven tapestry of Aotearoa's creative landscape- and a visual poem on the notion of identity.

Cultural identity has long played an important role in Sampero’s work. In her pivotal 2002 show, Muttermal/Birthmark, she explored her European heritage. The I AM series is a celebration of her New Zealand identity as part of a large and diverse arts community.

Delicia Sampero, now dividing her time between painting and motherhood, formerly danced with theatre group, Mau. She lives in West Auckland with her partner, the choreographer Lemi Ponifaso, and their son.

The Possibilities of identity  by Rigel Sorenzo

In her latest body of work, the painter Delicia Sampero continues her inquiry into the nature of identity, with particular focus on the relationship between individual and community.

Portraits and text panels combine in a sweeping installation, dramatic in its chequerboard contrast. But who are these people? Why has the artist brought them together? As one by one we recognise the faces and read the words, it’s evident that we’re looking at a community which transcends its current physical juxtaposition.

These individuals are linked by their connection to Sampero, by their various relationships to each other, their participation in creative work, and, ultimately, by their geographical affiliation. Although the portraits offer little external information about their subjects, the penumbra which surrounds them is part pohutukawa blush, part the dull red glow of fire, the when-not-if volcanic geology of New Zealand.

ID card, driver’s licence, passport: the isolated face as an official expression of identity is familiar to us all. Though Sampero’s portraits are benign, the subjects free to engage our gaze or look away, there’s something gritty in the texture and tones, something which makes the counterpoint of portrait and text panel read like a passport splayed open for inspection.

Sampero makes the point that “in notions of nationhood…the individual person is always hidden.” But what can a document of national identity really say about you? An open passport isn’t an open book, it’s a piece of code, a key which lets you in - and sometimes keeps you out.

This tension of the passport as a force of dark and light, is stamped home in the inky lines of the New Zealand coat of arms, laid like moko across the serene features of Ani O’Neill and Sofia Tekela-Smith.

As this work by Sampero suggests, a vital community is interwoven but open-ended, drawing on a connectivity which renews while it reinforces. There’s room for many ways of being, and belonging; marks of national identity and those of cultural affirmation needn’t be mutually exclusive.

The panels of text serve to link formal identification with likeness, but, more importantly, also provide us with glimpses of self, something a passport should never attempt. Trying to pin the myriad expressions of one’s identity to the page is an impossible, even destructive task; better the fragment, the surfacing memory, even the blank slate, not empty, but full of possibilities.

One hopes that Sampero will have the opportunity to explore further, expanding and reconfiguring this installation, mediating in different ways between text and image; for this body of work deserves to be as fluid and as open-ended as the community it presents. Rigel Sorzano

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