Footsteps in the Dark

The following text accompanied Footsteps in the Dark and a second painting, Night Drills, when they were first exhibited, as part of the 2021 New Museum Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone.

Painter Christina Pataialii incorporates various techniques to develop the surfaces of her works. Using tools and brushes, she makes marks, erases, and scrapes to layer colors and motifs with lingering ambiguity. The space of the paintings is intermediary—neither deep nor flat—a technique Pataialii
uses to introduce visual tension into the work. The images in the paintings do not readily reveal themselves, as they appear cropped from a larger scene.

A nod to her father’s work as a house painter throughout her childhood, Pataialii employs latex paint and canvas drop cloths, materials associated with the profession. Her palette
of muted pinks, browns, and greens invokes the colors often painted on public housing, where she and many other working-class, migrant families lived in New Zealand in the
1970s and 1980s. Recurring motifs of work boots and picket fences [the forms can also be read as rugby boots] can be found in Footsteps in the Dark and Night Drills, telegraphing the artist’s interest in how the conditions of labor and class constitute one’s identity and relationship to a place or community.