The Kowhai Journals IV

Shirley Vivian and Karen Williamson are exhibiting images from the 2010 Kowhai Festival at Tahi Bar, Warkworth. Showing Oct 5th-31st.

Jin Jiangbo: Dialogue with Nature, Starkwhite Gallery

From Starkwhite Gallery: Jin Jiangbo: Dialogue with Nature; 20 August–17 September 2011.

Previous to the new body of work featured in Dialogue with Nature, Jin Jiangbo became known to international contemporary art audiences through a practice that sought to not only chart China's growing global influence but also explore the impact of change upon both the urban landscape and its people. At a time of immense economic, social and cultural shift, Jin Jiangbo's photography, installation and multimedia works capture this momentous transition while also highlighting the incongruities hidden behind the rise of a burgeoning superpower. Panoramic photos of abandoned factories, unfinished residences or the debris left by rapid and often overnight factory closures bear witness to China's economic miracle, but also the withdrawal and decay that too-hasty development can inflict. In his photographs the urban landscape becomes a social imprint of the powerful and spectacular transformation wrought by and upon contemporary China. It is not just scenery but social landscape the artist is delivering – vivid, telling and richly symbolic.

New Zealand audiences were introduced to Jin Jiangbo's work at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 2009 in China in Four Seasons, a year-long suite of exhibitions and residencies by Chinese artists curated by Rhana Devenport. His exhibition featured large-scale photographic panoramas from series titled Prospects of the Chinese Market, The Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan Scene, and Shanghai, Shanghai Engine Plan, all setting China's socialist economic landscape against a backdrop of economic, social and cultural upheaval. [Read more...]


Jin Jiangbo's Photoforum portfolio


Starkwhite
510 Karangahape Road
Auckland
New Zealand
Tel. +64 9 3070703
starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz

Fiona Pardington: The Pressure of Sunlight Falling

From Otago University Press: European explorers of the Pacific in the 18th and early 19th centuries faced a problem – how to describe the people they met and report what they had seen and found. From Cook onwards, any serious expedition included artists and scientists in its ship's company.

An ambitious journey of the 19th century was the third voyage of the French explorer Dumont d'Urville, from 1837 to 1840. It was just before the invention of photography, when phrenology, the study of people's skulls, was the latest thing. D'Urville chose to take on the voyage an eminent phrenologist, Pierre-Marie Dumoutier, to preserve likenesses of people by making life casts. When the expedition returned to France, the casts were displayed, and later stored in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, to be joined eventually by other casts from Dumoutier's collection, including those of the d'Urville and Dumoutier families. All were overtaken by photography and history.

Fiona Pardington first learnt of the life casts in 2007, when a chance conversation initiated a four-year project. It took her from Auckland to the Musée de l'Homme, as she researched and photographed some of more than fifty casts of Maori, Pacific and European heads, including casts of her Ngai Tahu ancestors. This book publishes these photographs and coincides with the opening of a major travelling exhibition. [Read more...]

Available at Fishpond.

Simon Roberts

A photographer who deserves attention is the award winning British photographer Simon Roberts.

His first book, Motherland, was shot on a year-long journey with his wife, in over 200 locations around Russia. His second book, We English, was the product of a trip around England in a motorhome with his pregnant wife and two-year-old, in which he again explored the sense of 'belonging, of memory, identity and place' - but this time in his homeland.

This has been followed by the limited edition newspaper photo essay and touring exhibition, The Election Project, resulting from his being commissioned by the UK parliament Speaker's Advisory Committee on Works of Art, to document campaigning activity prior to the 2010 election.

Photo: From the book We English - The Haxey Hood, Haxey, North Lincolnshire, 5th January 2008, Simon Roberts