The Vault: Neil Pardington

Neil Pardington’s photographic series The Vault records the strange and sometimes surprising collections of objects amassed behind the closed doors of New Zealand’s museums and art galleries.

The Vault reveals that the “treasure troves” of the nation are bizarre places stocked with piles of archival films, stuffed deer, Victorian portraits, mannequins in disrepair and assiduously preserved taonga.

Many of these photographs highlight the orderliness of archival institutions—their regimented shelves, repeating patterns and stacked documents. These images are imbued with a certain solemnity which is then disrupted by their content, be that comical stuffed animals or grotesque preserved reptiles. The Vault is beautiful, strange and subtle in its suggestion that history is formed by a complex network of both rational and irrational decisions.

Neil Pardington (b. 1962) lives in Wellington and is of shared Māori (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Mamoe and Kāti Waewae) and Scottish ancestry. His work is held in the collections of major public institutions and he has exhibited widely. Recently, Pardington’s work was included in Mortality, an important exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, where it was shown alongside key international artists such as Tacita Dean and Tony Oursler.

Event listed by City Gallery Wellington

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