Odic Time Piece

New Plymouth, New Zealand, 2011

Odic Time Piece was a work commissioned by the Art in Public Places Trust. It was a large-scale public artwork that enveloped multiple surfaces of the New Plymouth Clock Tower. The work honoured patrons of the arts in Taranaki, past and present, while acknowledging those who would carry this cultural legacy forward. Beneath this outward gesture, the work held a more private register. At the time, Novak was not openly exploring queer content within his public practice, and instead embedded coded language and ideas as hidden meanings. In this work, that coding became more overt through the use of multiple colours and, more significantly, through the queering of a dominant architectural symbol in the city where he was born. Drawing on his deep familiarity with New Plymouth, shaped during his high school years, the work operated as a subtle but defiant intervention. It challenged the town’s historical hostility toward queer lives during the 1980’s and early to mid-1990’s, transforming a symbol of authority and order into a layered site of resistance, visibility, and reclamation.