We are delighted to announce that BRONWYN HOLLOWAY-SMITH is the winner of the second Ghuznee Street Art Billboard.

In developing her project Holloway-Smith has responded to billboards in the area. As marketing along the road for the as yet unbuilt Metropol apartments promotes a sustainable “choice for the future”, Holloway Smith promotes a future property development on Mars.

Employing conventional real estate strategies, the billboard may at first glance appear as a genuine advertisement. Closer examination reveals that the ‘new territories’ being marketed by Colonial Real Estate are a fiction. But Holloway-Smith says with NASA scientists aiming for a human mission to Mars in the next 20 years, and private innovators also paving the way, a Martian colony is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Holloway-Smith says the real estate industry has always marketed to human dreams and aspirations for a better life.

“We have seen this with the boom in inner-city apartment living in the past decade. We saw it in the 19th century in the way the New Zealand Company sold a romanticised picture of New Zealand to prospective settlers before they’d visited the country. My project responds to this kind of marketing in the inner city and draws attention to its timelessness,” Holloway-Smith said.

Supported by the Creative Communities Wellington Local Funding Scheme and Bartley + Company Art, the billboard project has been established to give artists an opportunity to work at a large scale and to intervene in the predominantly commercial nature of the city’s visual culture.

Bronwyn Holloway-Smith, who has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massey University, has a particular interest in new technologies and the futuristic ideals and challenges that these technologies may bring. Her work across diverse media is often sparked by Internet culture and virtual experiences and, as in this new project, she frequently draws from the past as a means of envisioning the future and imagining the fantastic. She is actively involved in the local arts community, has exhibited at galleries throughout New Zealand and Australia and has works represented in both public and private collections.

Holloway-Smith’s billboard, which will run until late June, is supplemented by a website: http://Pioneer-City.com