Following the 15 March 2019 terrorist attack in Christchurch, I interviewed Jono Rotman for Contemporary Hum, inviting him to reflect on these events in relation to his work (published 10 June 2019).
Excerpt below:
I first met Jono Rotman at Gow Langsford Gallery in Auckland in 2017. His exhibition Matériel featured large-scale photographs of guns from private American collections. Fascinated with the polarised public response to his earlier portraits of Mongrel Mob members presented at City Gallery Wellington and Gow Langsford in 2015 and 2016, I expressed my interest in writing on this new work of his. As Rotman returned to the US, we began an email conversation that quickly evolved across the continents.
Over this time, countless mass shootings unfolded – most prominently in the US – each one contributing to, and shifting, my reading of Matériel. In the wake of the 15 March [2019] terrorist attack in Christchurch, I asked Rotman to reflect on his diverse yet interconnected bodies of work…
