Private Collection, Auckland, Michael Lett Gallery

Portrait of Elmer Keith #1 comes from Michael Parekowhai’s The Beverly Hills Gun Club, which consists of a number of works involving taxidermy specimens of sparrows and rabbits all of which were shot against the same vivid background. Each rabbit and sparrow photographed was given a name: Elmer Keith, Ed Brown, Jimmy Rae, Larry Vickers and Lou Lombardi. Elmer Keith was the name of an American gun enthusiast who developed a new type of ammunition for revolvers, while Ed Brown is thought to be reference to Edwin Brown, a nineteenth-century English naturalist and taxidermy collector.

Parekowhai makes a variety of work across a range of media that intersects sculpture and photography. Curator Justin Paton wrote that Parekowhai’s works;... have a way of sneaking up on you, even when they’re straight ahead. Pick-up sticks swollen to the size of spears. A photograph of a stuffed rabbit who has you in his sights. In this work Portrait of Elmer Keith #1 it’s a common Sparrow.

A silky bouquet that rustles with politics. Seemingly serene beneath their gleaming, factory-finished surfaces, Michael Parekowhai’s sculptures and photographs are in fact supremely artful objects. ‘Artful’ not just because they’re beautifully made ... but also because they manage, with a combination of slyness, charm and audacity, to spring ambushes that leave you richer.