John Gregory by Marcus Williams at Te Tuhi The Mark

In his suburban bedroom John Gregory becomes a nocturnal 3 1/2-minute hero, picturing himself silhouetted in leather against the gothic, dry-ice nightscape of a music video. But the closest he will get to this fading teen fantasy of rock stardom is reminiscing about the time he snuck into a Mt Smart concert with his mates.

Now in his early 40s, Gregory lives with his mother and works as a car dealer in Pakuranga. His one moment of glamour is the hazy memory of trading a Ford Fairmont for 75 buddha sticks with the infamous drug dealer Tony Benetti (aka Martin Johnstone) in 1974.

Artist Marcus Williams, fascinated by the way our minds create and negotiate reality, has constructed an exhibition around Gregory's suburban world.

"He's kind of jaded and he's a character who lives very much in his fantasies," says Williams.

"So much so that who he really is and the world around him has sort of passed him by. He lives in the past and he's not very engaged at all."

Williams intentionally blurs the distinction between fact and fiction and first, second and third person narrative with his gallery installation of bedroom furniture, video sequences, photographs and text.

"The videos play around with the relationship between mental space, imagination, fantasy, and physical presence.

"That slippery relationship is something that I'm really interested in and it's something that Charlie Kaufman plays with in his movies, particularly Adaptation," he says, also citing William Burroughs' book The Naked Lunch as an earlier example.

"It's an extremely interesting literary phenomenon that has served the purpose of discussing the difficult nature of the construction of identity, and that's really what the show's about."

Included in the exhibition are enormous photos of cigarettes, which add a glamourised, seedy allure.

"Smoking is associated with sex, death, rock'n'roll, evil, coolness, liberal intellectualism, sophistication, glamour, power and almost all forms of subversion," he says.

"I've been playing with clear-cut photographs rather than the classical rectangle - actually cutting out the shapes of the things I photograph and placing them in the space in different ways.

"I'm interested in physically playing with the images as a sculptural object as a way of blurring that relationship between what it represents and what it actually is, which is a print."

Highlighting the contrast between the banal realities of domestic life and the violent world romanticised by the media, Williams has created a soundscape with appropriated elements from movies such as Apocalypse Now, James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause and the INXS song Devil Inside.

"There's quite a few layers of popular culture - movies and music - that sort of allude to this constant theme of the underbelly; the subversive counterculture or crime and drugs and, perhaps, a slightly nastier element," he says.

"It's been really dawning on me how, in a way, music videos, cinema and just popular culture in general have really appropriated evil. Evil has become personified by Hollywood in traceable and codeable ways.

"I remember in the 70s, when Mr Asia was a huge phenomenon in New Zealand - New Zealand was a lot different to New Zealand now - and he was an international figure and had international aspirations. It was very romantic, especially for a teenager."

Williams' career is also becoming increasingly international. Last year he had a residency in Estonia. On Sunday he left for a month in Russia.

While there, he will be working with a curator he met during last year's trip and meeting artists in St Petersburg, Siberia and Moscow for an exhibition that will explore a particularly Russian custom of characterisation.

"It's loosely looking at the Russian tradition of the absurd and the god's fool, which is sort of like the Shakespearean jester but it's a more extreme character. Particularly under the tsars, but also in the Soviet context, where there was a totalitarian regime, a jester or a fool played a pretty important role - where no one else could say things, the fool could."

Williams says an ongoing interest in his work is the ambiguity between abstract and actual space and the role language has in relating and defining our sense of reality.

"If you imagine a newborn baby, it's getting the same data, roughly, [as an adult] but it's just nonsense. As it develops, it develops language, and as it develops language, the data starts to make sense. So, you could argue that therefore the world is essentially language. The only way we can comprehend or interface with the world is with language. Without language, it's nonsense.

"If we were to imagine language as being much broader than the spoken word, also taking on board, for example, the language of photography or the language of cinema and the language of popular music or fashion, then it would follow logically that we were constructed by these things as much as we constructed these things.

"If that's the case, it begs the question, where does the real person begin and finish? At what point are we constructing the music video and at what point is the music video constructing us?"

John Gregory by Marcus Williams
*Where and when: Te Tuhi The Mark, 13 Reeves Rd, Pakuranga, to Nov 2