Art seen: Focus on family

Erin Driessen reviews the latest exhibitions from around Dunedin.

'Family', by Patrick Hartigan.

Patrick Hartigan paints snapshots of everyday life in an exhibition of new work entitled "Family", showing at Brett McDowell Gallery.

Intimate scenes of children, mothers and pets are depicted in muted tones, adding an aged quality to these works. Hartigan plays with frames and shadows, using simple, bold lines and blocks of colour.

In certain pieces, faces are without detail; the artist's use of shadow combines with this incompleteness to evoke a sense of hazy memory in the viewer, causing one to attribute to Hartigan's families details of their own.

Specific, however, are two Dunedin houses. Each sits under a grey sky along an empty street. No cars line the road and there are no signs of life. Instead, shadows loom like family secrets.

Mother and Child 2 and Mother's Birthday are more intimate images. Faces are once again left blank and emotionless, but the positions of the sitters, close to and touching each other, speak a language instantly understood.

There is an intriguing conflict within these works, between displays of affection and something completely hidden, a sense of quiet and loneliness. Hartigan has produced a portrait of family life quite unique in style, and universal in content.

'Rajasthani Puppets', by Kirsten Baldwin.

"Pieces of India", an exhibition of paintings by Kirsten Baldwin, splashes the walls of Moray Gallery with rich, bright colours and exotic patterns.

Baldwin's use of sharp angles and ordered composition complements her elegant and extremely detailed textile-like patterning of saris, turbans and shoes. Along with traditional Indian dress, subject matter includes the more whimsical magic carpets, a Turban Tree and Rajasthani Puppets, as well as displays of rural and urban life.

Paisley is pure pattern; beads have been intricately woven into the work. I See You is composed like a pattern, but depicts a crowd of people, their eyes looking in all directions. Great attention is paid to detail in the eyes, eyebrows, bindis and turbans.

Women in Sari Shop is beautifully executed, and is the best example of Baldwin's dynamic compositional skills and textile detailing. Six women are shown in profile, each looking inward. Placed among them are differently coloured and patterned blocks representing saris. This painting is a highlight and its imagery itself would make a wonderful piece of wearable art.

Three images of puppets hang in series. These fun, lively cartoonish works are a fitting endnote to an exhibition that is a real feast for the eye.

'Pool II', by Annabel Menzies-Joyce.

Pieces of the land are captured in exhibitions "Seven Signs" and "Water", by Trevor Byron and Annabel Menzies-Joyce respectively, on display at Quadrant Gallery.

Byron's range of pieces includes salt and pepper shakers, necklaces and condiment boats. Each of the seven displays - clouds, birds, mountains, sounding, foam, aweigh and ashore - represents early migrants identifying that land was near, then coming ashore.

Difficult to fully explain here, this idea is beautifully illustrated in the works themselves. The sterling silver Foam necklace is a sheen chain of circles so light it feels like water frothing at your fingers. The salt and pepper shakers Mountains need no S or P to distinguish them; just a difference in height.

Menzies-Joyce focuses on water, but at the same time her cast-glass creations appear as crystallised land formations. The "Water" pieces look like mountain peaks as the viewer moves closer to and around the works.

The illusion of depth and the rocky, gritty look of the lower sections of these pieces echo the immensity of the mountains.

In contrast to the stronger "Water" pieces are the more delicate and fragile "Splash" works. Thin sheets of frosty glass appear as iced wings of water, caught and frozen.

These are works of admirable beauty and skill, and displayed together these two exhibitions complement each other very well.