Matariki - He wa maumaharatanga, te iwi, te whenua
Matariki - A time of remembrance; of people and of place
Exhibition dates: May 28th – July 11th 2010, Opening Thursday 27th May, 6pm
This year, the Matariki exhibition at Corban Estate Arts Centre will combine the annual Auckland Festival of Photography with our established Matariki celebrations.
We are looking for photographers and multimedia/film artists to submit work that echoes one of the core themes of Matariki as a time of remembrance.
Images/works may depict people who have left our lives, the places we hold dear as well as milestones or events that are cherished. Please feel free to be creative, remembrance can have different meanings for everyone and we welcome your interpretation.
While submissions are welcome from everyone, we would particularly like to encourage Maori photographers to submit.
Submissions are restricted to photography or multimedia and film. There is no size restriction, however please include dimensions in your submission. Submissions will be accepted immediately and will close on the 6th of April 2010.
Please send an email to the curator, Lisa Rogers with the following:
- A few sentences on the subject matter and significance of EACH of the work/s you are submitting for consideration. Please include the title of each work.
- Jpg or pdf files of the works – there is no limit on the amount you submit, however please make sure the total size of attachments by email aren’t more than 8MB – feel free to send images in more than one email, clearly marked.
- A short paragraph about yourself and background including photographic experience or otherwise and exhibiting history.
We look forward to receiving submissions – please pass this email on to anyone you think may be interested…
As an added bonus, any submissions accepted for the exhibition and received before February 10th 2010, could be chosen as the image to accompany all of our advertising, media releases and regional promotions (with artist accreditation on the images).
Any questions please email me lisa@ceac.org.nz or phone 09 838 4455 x 203
Lisa Rogers, Curator and Exhibitions Manager

Contemporary photographic works by Janet McGifford and Kirsty Lillico.

13th February  to 27th February 2010, Opening - Friday 12th February, 5-7pm

Photospace Gallery 1st floor, 37 Courtenay Place Wellington

Leaning Tower of Pisa, Janet McGifford

Janet McGifford’s work examines the complex relationship photography plays in determining the nature of the tourist experience through the collective visualisation of the tourist gaze. She employs the use of digital photographic processes and the manipulation of travel photography of tourist destinations sourced from the Internet.

McGifford’s photographs are reminiscent of the feathery brushwork of Impressionist painting. The Impressionists were, in part, reacting to the rising popularity of photography. They sought to capture the temporal and subjective nature of seeing, as opposed to their perception of the camera’s mechanical recording of one moment in time. Using the tool of Photoshop, McGifford introdues a similar unfolding sense of time back into the subject of the landscape.

She says, “I am interested in how travel photography can play a part in directing an act of engagement between tourist and site. The inherent relationships between representation, authentication, standardisation and documentation are explored, and bring together ideas of the archival and the sublime through the discovery and engagement of popular travel sites such as the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China”.

Study 2, Kirsty Lillico

Using both sculptural and photographic procedures, Kirsty Lillico’s work extends the conventions of dress and its functionality, in order to examine a human dilemma between the desire to protect a state of interiority and the need to perform one’s identity to the exterior.

In Opposite & Above, Lillico uses digital photography to document a series of toiles; hand-made calico garments used in the process of clothing design. These garments are modeled for the camera by a subject whose identity is withheld through the concealing nature of the garments, and by gesture.

The formal construction of the photograph - lighting, composition, setting - suggests the psychological and social function for the garments’ use and manufacture, and has been informed by the work of 17th century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer.

This work creates an engagement with clothing as an agent of protection through the interaction between classical painting references and the contemporary context of the work.

Lisa Reihana presents Nga Hau e Wha a series of photographs that describe geographic locations, speak of familial connections and re-imagine Maori portraiture. The works have been developed from the recent work Mai i te aroha, ko te aroha, a major art commission for Te Papa Tongarewa.

Lisa Reihana graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University in 1987. Her practice is wide-ranging, and she is widely acknowledged as a ‘Mäori international’ with an extensive exhibition history.

Exhibition 12 February 2010 -11 April 2010, Lopdell House Gallery, Titirangi, Auckland (open daily 10am - 4.30pm), admission free.

Opening Thursday 11 February, 6pm

For those who are in London:

Mass Gathering in defence of street photography

I’m a Photographer, Not a Terrorist! invite all Photographers to a mass photo gathering in defence of street photography.

Following a series of high profile detentions under s44 of the terrorism act including 7 armed police detaining an award winning architectural photographer in the City of London, the arrest of a press photographer covering campaigning santas at City Airport and the stop and search of a BBC photographer at St Pauls Cathedral and many others. PHNAT feels now is the time for a mass turnout of Photographers, professional and amateur to defend our rights and stop the abuse of the terror laws.

Link: http://photographernotaterrorist.org/events/

Travcom (NZ Travel Communicators) is calling for entries in the annual Cathay Pacific Travel Media Awards.  There are some terrific prizes to be won for both published and unpublished work.

The supreme winners of the Cathay Pacific Travel Writer of the Year Award and Cathay Pacific Travel Photographer of the Year Award will each receive two return tickets to Johannesburg plus $500 towards travel expenses and a seven day South African Safari package with Adventure World, staying at a private game lodge in the Kruger and Drakensburg region.  For more information go to our website.

Photographic Awards:

Jucy Rentals Award for the Best Travel Image taken in New Zealand and Pacific Islands
The winner receives $2000 worth of travel with Jucy Rentals.

Leica Award for the Best Travel Image Taken Outside New Zealand
The winner receives $2,000 worth of photographic products courtesy of Leica Camera AG and Lacklands Ltd.

Air Vanuatu & Mangoes Resort Award for the Best Series of Travel Images
The winner receives two return economy class tickets to Port Vila plus four nights’ accommodation at Mangoes resort and a light breakfast.

AA Directions Magazine Award for the Best Travel Image with People
The winner receives $1500 cash plus the winning image will be published in AA Directions magazine.

Epson Award for the Best Unpublished Travel Image
The winner receives $2000 worth of Epson products.

Whitcoulls Travel Book of the Year
The Whitcoulls Travel Book of the Year Award is presented for the best original book of creative travel writing about any country, including New Zealand.   Whitcoulls will award the winner $2000 cash and $500 in book vouchers. The runner-up will receive $500 in book vouchers.
Entries for the book award close 18 December 2009.

Entries for the writing and photography awards close 5 February 2010.

The awards presentation and gala dinner will be held at the Heritage Hotel Grand Tearoom on Tuesday the 23rd of March 2010, rewarding New Zealand’s talented writers and photographers for their skills.  Find out more about the awards, prizes, entry criteria, forms, previous winners and how to join Travcom at www.travelcommunicators.co.nz or email helen.davies@clear.net.nz . You should be able to download entry forms directly from the website, but if you have any problems please email helen and she will post you an entry form.

Richard Smallfield, a photographer from Leigh, is holding his third solo exhibition, entitled Leigh … by night, at the Leigh Sawmill Cafe, opening at 5.30pm on Thursday December 17 and running until Sunday January 17 (except for 21-26 December, when the venue will be closed).

The exhibition will consist of a series of black and white photos of Leigh at night, revealing aspects of the coastal village that people do not usually stop to look at - such as the bread delivery at dawn, the floodlit buildings of the Leigh Fisheries, and the Leigh Wharf which seemingly teeters on the edge of a black abyss.

Richard seeks to observe and document his locality from uncommon viewpoints.

Guest Appearances is an exhibition by Karen Crisp and Karena Way, being held at Laundromat Art Project Spaces from 27th November – 15th December.

Karen Crisp completed a Master of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2008, having maintained a decade-long interest in the idea of ‘landscape’ as an historical, conceptual, cultural and physical construct. She utilises photography to consider the residues of history contained in landscapes, and to portray sites as primarily marked by absence. Her images provide a scene for the examination of the landscape, and offer an interrogation of the mediated relationships that form through the physical, historical, personal and associative meanings they conjure in the viewer.

Key themes include landscape as a history of ecological disruption, and the portrayal of the loss of biological complexity and of habitats. The landscapes portrayed will be familiar and may appear banal to many New Zealanders, but these are sites that have been destroyed by clearance, settlement and intensive agricultural practices.

Karena uses image, objects and sound to illuminate some of the contradictions of post-colonial ‘culture’. In particular she explores the operation of a national a-historical post-colonial zeitgeist in a colonial nation state, the tensions between a non-indigenous artist attempting to work in the space between indigenous and guest without spelling out what it means to be indigenous – and the challenge of inviting engagement with these tensions in the contemporary world.

Her work is about seeing and not seeing, about floating above and beyond history and our place in it. If seeing is believing, then in these works (in the words of Andrea Geyer) we also have to ‘believe to see’. The claim of caretaker/guardian comes from the knowledge passed down through the arterial heartland of this home-land and its people. ‘They’ still read the painful signposts invisible to ‘us’, still see the markings, scarrings, tracings of history as blinding fluorescent highlights crisscrossing the land at every cliff face, ridge, drained swamp and denuded forest, glistering red dye coursing and screaming its way through the polluted streams, great sacred rivers and waterways.

Karena underscores her process and making with the question: ‘how can we learn to see, or indeed enter the conversation, with a sanitised memory of nation-making as the dominant image of our world?’

27th November – 15th December
Opening night Friday 27th 6pm - 9pm, all invited

The Laundromat Art Project Space
92 Second Avenue,
Tauranga