Art Seen

'Cadence', by Laura Hardie

The Artist's Room is currently presenting works by two artists, one well known locally, and one whose works are new to the city. Their two styles could not be more different, yet the pictures sit alongside each other well.

Emma Milburn's works are the better known of the two in Dunedin. Her evocative, muted landscapes depict rural Otago as a series of montaged impressions, creating dreamscapes in tones of brown and grey. The horizon hills, old fenceposts, and shadowy animals become haunting mental topologies which are imbued with the nature of the land rather than being precise depictions of it, and as a result speak more clearly of Otago than many exact representations of it might.

On the other side of the gallery, Laura Hardie's works are a revelation. Well known in her native Scotland, this is a first Dunedin display of her astonishing animal portraits.

The images are, without exception, stunning. Hardie has captured expression, movement, and muscle with perfection with her graphite and coloured pencils, and also has a clear understanding of the use of negative space within an image. As a result, she has created a series of outstanding depictions of horses and dogs which perfectly capture the character and personality of her subjects.''

'Untitled', by Philip Madill

Graphite drawings are also to the fore in Philip Madill's exhibition at Mint. The artist has produced a range of images which explore the concept of the interconnectedness of time and change through technology.

In his attractive works, Madill has started with images taken directly from historic photographs, and overlaid these with anachronistic devices and machinery to produce composites which hint at the social impacts of technology and, indirectly, at the clash of cultures.

Several of the original images have been taken from archaic postcard exotica, showing images such as the idyllic, archetype beach scenes of unspoilt Pacific Island life.

These artificial images have further been removed from reality with the addition of futuristic mechanisms. In doing this, the artist has pinpointed the effects of cultural colonialism and its effect on human society, whilst simultaneously hinting at the seemingly unchanging backdrop of the natural world.

Other images show the startling changes in modern technology over the past few years and the effects of technology on the natural world.

The images are jarring, inasmuch as the combinations and juxtapositions of features are unexpected, but the images themselves are well drawn and well-constructed, with both the natural elements and machinery effectively depicted.

'The Cubic Structural Evolution Project', by Olafur Eliasson

The exhibit by Olafur Eliasson at Dunedin's Public Art Gallery is perhaps better described as being by Eliasson and the Dunedin public. An entirely interactive piece, it uses that most banal and versatile of children's toys, Lego blocks, to examine human creativity and the built environment.

Danish-born Eliasson has had a long interest in the way humans shape their environment, and human society as a powerful yet chaotic self-perpetuating entity. In particular, it is the power of ordinary people within society to make an individual, yet co-operative, mark which has attracted his attention. In this exhibition, the artist has utilised his nation's most famous toy as a means of exploring both our rigid societal norms of architectural construction and our imaginations in breaking and subverting those unwritten constraints.

Over the course of the exhibition, tens of thousands of white building blocks are being transformed by gallery visitors into an increasingly complex and ever-changing cityscape covering about 10sq m. Lego block buildings are being constructed, extended, and demolished, and the installation is becoming increasingly complex as the city evolves.

The resulting display, created in concept by the artist and in fact by the public, is both fascinating to view and fun to help shape.

- by James Dignan