"Are we there yet?": Natalie Robertson's road signs and the redirection of cultural memory

This article explores the way that the themes of cultural memory and commemoration are embodied by the photographs of New Zealand artist Natalie Robertson. Robertson photographs the official, mass-produced road signs that exist throughout the New Zealand landscape. Because she conducts her photographic activity at night, the signs come to appear as luminous effigies of the past, whereby the names adorning their surfaces appear as strange and at times uncanny reminders to passersby of the land's original ownership and affiliations. This nocturnal focus enables Robertson to show that despite pointing to actual roadways (which tend for the most part to be subsumed within our everyday mode of consciousness), the signs she represents also work to acknowledge and commemorate a history that remains obscured by mainstream conceptions, understandings, and experiences of place.