Exhibitions
Events
On display
Neil Pardington: Designer, photographer and filmmaker
Neil Pardington. Arthropoda, Auckland Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira #1 2013. Forty-eight prints ed of 3
Friends
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
No booking required. Friends $5, non-members $8, students with ID free.
Due to unforeseen circumstances Kriselle Baker is unable to take part this lecture, however Neil Pardington will be presenting.
As one of New Zealand’s most established contemporary photographers, Neil’s critically acclaimed series of works The Clinic and The Vault document the operating and storage areas within hospitals and museums. These images take into account the history and practices of medicine and of collecting.
As Creative Director at Base Two, a focus of his career has been working in the arts sector designing many award-winning publications. These include Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance, Handboek: Ans Westra Photographs, The Vault: Neil Pardington and Five Māori Painters. His work in publishing has now evolved into digital books, with his own book The Order of Things and Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation being presented in printed and digital formats.
Neil is of Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Mamoe, Ngāti Waewae and Pākehā descent and is a graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland.
Related reading: Friends, Publishing
Exhibition
Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation
9 July – 6 November 2016
A survey exhibition by a leading New Zealand photographer explores sex, death and the female gaze.
Collection
Fiona Pardington Still Life with Barley Grass and Freesia, Waiheke
“Every object has a particular meaning for me, a certain feeling, an emotion, a history – often a history I can sense, even though I can’t tell you its story.” —Fiona Pardington
Fiona Pardington’s still-life photographs assemble a myriad collection of objects that carry highly personal meanings for the artist. Objects, both found and owned, are assembled in the European still-life tradition but on the artist’s terms. Water held in containers, like the vase in this work, represent South Island creeks and rivers reflecting Fiona’s connection to Te Waipounamu through her Ngāi Tahu and Clan Cameron heritage.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Commentary
Beyond The Fields We Know
In the canons of received taste, the unicorn figurine doesn’t rank terribly highly beyond kitsch. Sitting in your hand, it’s cutesy, twee, trivial and quaint (though a piece of master-worked Venetian glass from Murano is a pricey and collectable item).
Commentary
The Camera as a Place of Potential
To Māori, the colour black represents Te Korekore – the realm of potential being, energy, the void, and nothingness. The notion of potential and the presence of women are what I see when I peek at Fiona Pardington’s 1997 work Moko. And I say peek deliberately, because I am quite mindful of this work – it is downright spooky. Moko is a photographic rendering of a seeping water stain upon the blackboard in Pardington’s studio, taken while she was the recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in Dunedin in 1997.
Notes
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Notes
Heck yeah, that happened!
Our very own Art-tastic by our very own Sarah Pepperle won TWO awards at last night's New Zealand Book Awards for Children & Young Adults at Te Papa!!!
Notes
This is ART-TASTIC!!
Our ART-TASTIC art activity book for kids has been nominated for the New Zealand Book Awards for Children & Young Adults! Ka rawe, nice one us! #NZCYA
Notes
Christchurch Art Gallery scoops major Australasian design awards
Congrats to our publishing team of David Simpson and Sarah Pepperle for a night of bests at the Museums Australasia Publication Design Awards at a gala event in Alice Springs last night. The Gallery won best magazine (Bulletin), best book (Us v Them: Tony de Lautour), best children's book (ART-TASTIC) and best in show (Us v Them)!
Notes
Bishopdale School Rulez
These Year 6 students at Bishopdale Primary School have knocked it out of the park with their AMAZING glitter artworks from our new ART-TASTIC activity book.
Notes
Underworld 2 by Tony de Lautour
This article first appeared as 'Painting offers a multiverse of symbols' in The Press on 21 June 2017.
Notes
Walk the Beat
Volunteer guide Rod McKay talks about his life, being an art tourist, and guiding Gallery tours.
Notes
The Art Whisperer
Christchurch Art Gallery volunteer guide Bella Boyd talks about her love of guiding, her favourite works in the Gallery collection and interpreting art with poetry.
Commentary
Mediating Reality
In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.
Commentary
Do You See?
With the death of Julie King late in 2018, art and art history in Aotearoa New Zealand lost one of its great champions and major scholars. Julie was born in Yorkshire and grew up and was educated in Alnwick, Northumberland; she moved to Christchurch in 1975 to take up a role lecturing in the newly formed art history department at the University of Canterbury. She retired three decades later, having pioneered the teaching of New Zealand art in Canterbury.