Contemporary New Zealand Photography: Group Exhibition

Gow Langsford Gallery presents two exhibitions to coincide with the Auckland Festival of Photography 2012. Contemporary New Zealand Photography  (Lorne St) and Negative Kept (Kitchener St, until 23 June). Contemporary New Zealand Photography is a curated group exhibition of contemporary photographs canvassing a diverse range of subjects and photographic processes.

 

Geoffrey H. Short's towards another (big bang) theory is an on-going series exploring the relationship between terror and the sublime. The series began with his BFA (Hons) graduate exhibition at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland 2009. Four pieces from the series are included in reGeneration2 - Tomorrow's Photographers Today produced by the Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland and published by Thames & Hudson. The associated exhibition has toured Europe and the United States. Selections from the series have also been exhibited in the group show Moment & Eternity - A New Zealand View at the Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao, China 2011, and were included in the Fotojakta Festival of Creative Photography, Czech Republic, 2012.

Fiona Pardington's main areas of interest have been the history of the photographic image and the nature of the relationship between the photographer and the subject. She has explored themes of medical and psychoanalytical imagery, and more recently taonga (treasured objects) within museums that relate to her Maori heritage. A defining aspect of her work has been a profound empathy with her subject. This was made especially evident in her most recent series Ahua: A beautiful hesitation, to which Marquis de Sade (2010) belongs.  

 

Ross Brown is primarily a commercial photographer. He has won many industry awards and his work is held in the collection of the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. In more recent years his focus has turned to a more artistic and individual approach to photography. His subjects are depicted in the manner of Renaissance portraits yet with a futuristic sensibility, the combination of which is strangely compelling. 

 

Using obsolete photographic processes Ben Cauchi creates haunting glass plate images that hark back to another time. From the series The Book of Hours, in Studio Aid (2004) a dismembered arm is presented in an antique manner. The memories evoked by the vintage style subvert the viewers' perception of reality. 

The three works from Patrick Reynolds' Muse variations series shown here seek to "explore the possibilities of the contemporary photographic medium without any preconceived limit to its expressiveness."(artist statement 2009) Each work in series takes its genesis from the same image which is manipulated by various post production technologies, creating dramatic different new images.

 

Anne Noble's WHITENOISE WN#1 WHITEOUT WHITENOISE -  is the culmination of an investigation into light and space on the Polar Plateau. "The 'Whiteout' photographs aim to articulate the search for an image and the struggle to see. They also aim to evoke both the wonder of the ice and the irony that through looking at white (and all the contrasts and subtleties of that colour, tone, and hue) we can examine the act of seeing itself-the processes of creating imaginatively what is not there-and our human capacity for making that absence a presence for which we long" (artist statement). This project was undertaken as a cataloguing of light and space. The series of 50 images includes extraordinary Antarctic optical phenomena such as whiteouts fogbows, halos and sundogs, falling ice crystals, illusory spaces, and imaginary geographies.

 

Omega Centauri is from Michael Parekowhai's Gow Langsford Gallery exhibition All there is (2001). Following on from ideas explored in his earlier exhibition Beverly Hills Gun Club the works examine ideas of mid-west American post-colonial culture. Here Parekowhai has taken images of toy sheriff badges and given them a new context. Subverted by a shift in scale the seemingly innocuous plastic objects continue ideas identity and farce.

Anne Noble and Fiona Pardington are represented by and in association with Two Rooms Gallery.