April 10, 2025
Written and recorded by Gallery & Curatorial Fellow Tyler McSheffrey
Rabbits, So Hot Right Now, is a contemporary oil painting of a New Zealand landscape by Irish-American artist Micheal MacMahon. It spans 30 by 38 inches and is one of three paintings McMahon has on view of the New Zealand countryside, inspired by a recent hiking trip.
MacMahon grew up in rural Ireland; his childhood was deeply shaped by immersion in the landscape and natural world. He spent much of his youth exploring the deep woods that surrounded his home, piecing together his identity and the role that Irish culture played in it.
His work is influenced by anticolonialist ideology, which drew him to New Zealand, another postcolonial country. MacMahon presents his landscapes as an antithesis to the “manifest destiny” ideology pushed by nineteenth-century artists and institutions like the Hudson River School. Works like The Oxbow, by Thomas Cole, presented the idea of there being beautiful “unoccupied” land that was ripe for the taking and just waiting to be tamed, colonized, and used by European settlers. In reality, this land was occupied by indigenous people, who were subsequently and very intentionally forcefully removed by colonizers. New Zealand is an interesting case, it’s a bicultural country, as the British were not able to fully colonize it and had to sign a treaty with the Māori, the indigenous people of the land. The idea was for them to share the land and to figure out how to coexist.
The land depicted in this painting is indigenous land that European farmers took control of in the 1800s. They brought over cows and sheep to raise for food and wool, and deers and rabbits to hunt, like they would back in the English countryside. The rabbit population rapidly got out of control, and as they burrowed into the land, it became dangerous to farm and was subsequently abandoned by the colonists.
MacMahon disrupts the viewer’s ability to completely immerse themselves in the landscape by adding barriers, including a rusty gate, a herd of rabbits mating, and seemingly abstract red, white, and blue stripes. The stripes are a replication of a Union Jack flag that has been erased by the landscape, symbolically taking back the land and the power from the British empire. Even though only slight remnants of the empire remain visually, the image is predominantly painted with purples, as if the red and blue of the Union Jack has stained the land. This saturation of purple represents how the colonizers have permanently devastated the natural balance.
To this day, we are overwhelmed by the long-term effects of colonization and imperialism. How can this historical knowledge change your perception of the world around you?