A Beautiful Hesitation

Overview

The function of photography as a 'hesitation in time' is used to great yet unsettling effect in Fiona Pardington's new exhibition at the City Gallery.

Often considered confronting, Pardington's work intends to disarm the audience's views and understanding of our world. For A Beautiful Hesitation, she does so using a thematically diverse presentation of still life photography. Composed of found objects from New Zealand's beaches, riverbeds, museum collections and secondhand stores, each of Pardington's works presents a "sovereign world." Using the historic European craft of still-life photography to provoke a personal reaction in audiences, the works often put preconceptions at odds with the individual "logic, experiences and pressures" of each composition. Threads of both the personal and political are present in this range of works, reflecting her societal and individual concerns which have spanned her 30-year career.

The exhibition has been sorted into four threads by curator Aaron Lister - including One Night of Love which takes soft-core magazine female nudes and presents them afresh and Tainted Love, a medical suite series using images of various diseases found in medical textbooks.