Three special screenings of the 2022 film, Geoff Dixon: Portraits of Us, are being shown at the St James Theatre in Gore this weekend and next Tuesday .
Glenis Giles and Clare O’Leary’s documentary invites us into Dixon’s cluttered studio as he prepares works for his next exhibition, transforming children’s toys and hard enamel paint into surreal collages of spacecraft and birdlife.
The Bluff-born Dixon, who lives in Cairns, has long held a fascination with endangered birds.
Southland’s own takahē often feature prominently in his work alongside many other threatened species as a metaphor for the destruction of the natural world.
The documentary, which debuted at the 2022 NZ International Film Festival, features a series of portraits of Dixon which were shown at the Eastern Southland Gallery as part of Euan Macleod’s recent exhibition "Flux".
That exhibition, which finished on Sunday, featured a series of more than 400 portraits of his friend Dixon, created almost daily over FaceTime since 2021.
The film unravels Dixon’s past — growing up in Nelson and his formative years at art school in Christchurch where he met Macleod — dissecting his seemingly contradictory obsessions with science fiction, space travel, nature and extinction which have shaped his unique artistic style and vision.
His work is both confronting and celebratory, revelling in the marvellous splendour of the natural world while also mourning its seemingly inevitable loss.
As he describes them, the works are a "portrait of us" and an unnerving look into the future.
Dixon said he just started wanting to paint endangered birds, and yet they were hard to find in the nineties.
"You’d look them up and they’re not endangered ... but now, so much is in a critical situation environmentally, I can paint them all.
"That’s how it all happened. That’s why I became a bird person." — APL
