François-Edmond Pâris was a twenty-year-old naval ensign when he joined Dumont d’Urville’s Pacific survey of 1826–29. He became involved in a comprehensive study of the ships and boats of the peoples they encountered. “We are in the most complete ignorance of the watercraft of peoples and times whose clothing, weapons and the most common objects we know in detail”, he later commented, and with his project “sought to correct this oversight”.

Two prints relating to Pâris’s New Zealand observations appeared in d’Urville’s 1833 published account, presenting a range of impressive waka seen at Tasman Bay, Tolaga Bay and Bream Bay, the largest nearly seventeen metres long. He also documented a rich variety of tau ihu (canoe prows) with their ornately carved forms.

Pâris retired from the French navy as a vice-admiral in 1871, after which time he was put in charge of the Musée national de la Marine in Paris. (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)

Aged just twenty when he joined Dumont d’Urville’s 1826–29 Pacific survey, François-Edmond Pâris created a comprehensive visual record of ships and boats encountered. In 1827 he recorded vessels he saw at Ūawa Tolaga Bay and Paepae-o-Tū Bream Bay, and Te Tai-o-Aorere Tasman Bay and Tāmaki Strait, Auckland.

(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)

The past is the subject of this photograph by Paul Johns – as it is the subject of all photographs. A photograph exists in the present, but what is photographed is immediately and always the past. Rather than reconstruct a specific memory, Johns’s photograph alludes to the construction of memory itself – partial, hallucinatory, inconclusive and often pieced together afterwards from photographs. The rabbit’s head somehow suggests the fevered vision of a dream, or perhaps the White Rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – always late and anxiously running to catch up.

(Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary, 15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)

Paris-born Louise Henderson moved to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1925 and was in her mid-eighties when she took up one of the boldest painting projects of her long career: a series of twelve large cubist-inspired canvases tracking the months of the year. In employing the soft colours of late spring, November conveys a certain sense of lightness and serenity. Painted at a scale that feels architectural and with a vigorous structural arrangement, it can be seen as an expression of the artist’s pleasure in the visual language of modernism.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )