There is widespread belief in the general public that viewing art is a form of decoding in which various levels of meaning are only available to initiates. It's a question of who does the defining. In the next room, Ronnie van Hout presented a series of UFO drawings juxtaposed with photocopies of his unemployment documentation from the New Zealand Labour Department. Scattered around the room on plinths were painted plastic models, tiny dioramas depicting the debris of war. These latter fragments constituted a virtual world that was never whole.
Western consciousness continues to fear the unknown, which is always the unknowable.
With the apocalypse always just around the corner, van Hout and Stevenson analyse contemporary paranoid fantasies of the unknown. The capitalist artworld of Mike Stevenson preys on people's insecurities, creating anxiety and paranoia. Van Hout's mini dioramas remain frozen moments in a ruptured world in which God has died and the aliens have landed.