Shane Cotton and Fiona Pardington

This exhibition of two of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most acclaimed artists, Shane Cotton and Fiona Pardington, is the final in a series of four paired exhibitions presented across both our Melbourne and Sydney galleries this year.

Like with the previous presentations, this exhibition is less about concentrating on possible similarities, be it conceptually, visually, materially or even generationally. Rather, the curiosity is in how the act of looking at two artists in a singular context can afford a greater engagement with each. For within a paired presentation the space for conversation, contemplation and sometimes combat come into view.

Inevitably, paired exhibitions evoke a duet, where flow or the “pas de deux” of the presentation is apparent. Removing the synchronicity, the benefit to the coupling is how the viewer’s eye moves from one practitioner to the other. At a glance, in depth, through one work into another, a pairing presents a back-and-forth, registering the dialectic associated with similarities and disparities. In the case of Cotton and Pardington, their similarities are extensive, the disparities also detectable. But to move through these givens, the possibility of now being able to intensely seize the fabric of each artist because of the counterpoint, provides the possibility of uncovering something richer, or something new within each. A dense extrapolation of what makes each tick.