Art seen: 23 June

Whakapapa, by Cornell Tukiri.

(Otago Museum)

Otago Museum is showing work by the finalists in the Kiingi Tuheitia Portraiture competition, a new initiative aimed at Tangata Whenua artists from around the country.

The works on show are from last year's inaugural competition, and have been touring the country since the announcement of the winning entry, Bodie Friend's charming photographic essay of Nana Pat (Pat Kingi). Works are in a wide range of media, from traditional Maori and western materials to modern digital and video representations. Themes of tupuna, whanau, and whakapapa weave through the exhibition.

There are too many fine works to list, but pieces which caught my eye include Te Haunui Tuna's unnerving mixed media blinking drawing Survival, Eleanor Wright's stately study in chiaroscuro photography, Regan Balzer's heartwarming painting Guide Susan: A Matriarch (Not a Maiden), Cornell Tukiri's haunting photographic double-portrait Whakapapa, and Ngahina Belton-Bodsworth's fine painted triptych. Several of the artists took a more lateral approach to the concept of "portrait", among them Jonathan Morrish with his digital drawing Turangawaewae - A place to stand, with its mildly surreal meditations on land and history.

The works are cleverly displayed in and around the historical artefacts in the museum's Tangata Whenua Gallery, suggesting the growing and ongoing journey of Maori art from the pre-European to the present day.

A Blue Window, by Oliver Perkins, with "Free-Range" visible through the window.

(Dunedin Public Art Gallery)

Two parallel displays become part of an extended exhibition by Oliver Perkins at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

The largest work, "Free-Range", is a massive colour-field employing aluminium poles, which occupies the gallery's Big Wall. The scale of this work is a reflection of the size of the structure (the gallery) in which it resides. The poles' vertical striations add a three-dimensional feature which emphasises the painting's architectural nature.

Opposite this piece, Perkins presents "A kind of arrow". This exhibition includes both architectural colour fields similar to "Free-Range", and a series of smaller mixed-media works in which the traditional painting process is subverted by the cutting of canvas and interposing of painted board layers. These abstract pieces question the essence of the framed image. The boards are slotted into canvas loops to produce images which seem to be both art and containers for art. By analogy, the artist is exploring the gallery as a container for artworks whilst simultaneously being an artwork in itself.

This recursive view is accentuated by the deliberate use of a window, through which the Big Wall work can be seen to be framed by a solidly painted wall featuring the same aluminium rods. Not only is canvas pierced to create a three-dimensional artwork, but so too is the gallery itself.

Clouds Tumble Past on a Cool Breeze, by Simon Jewell.

(The Artist's Room)

Simon Jewell is an English painter, born in Oxford and now living in Cornwall, who produces bucolic landscapes of the English countryside.

Despite the apparent disjoint between these places and Dunedin's surroundings, there is a similarity and resemblance which gives rise to the exhibition's title, Connections to another land. Works such as Granite sits like an upturned boat marooned in a sea of Copper & Gold could as easily be Strath-Taieri scenes as Cornwall.

The paintings are beautifully constructed, with deft painterly strokes delineating but never defining the grasses, trees, and ponds of the countryside. These are spring and autumn scenes, dominated by straw browns and soft greens under a pale blue sky. The harshness of the other seasons is deliberately avoided, so as to produce a timeless land suspended forever between heat and cold. Framed by thin slashes of paint which evoke the grasses of cool pleasant meadows, many of the backgrounds fade into a gentle haze of light. This is most notable in paintings such as the late-autumn scene Swaying in the wind and the waterscape The Early Morning Calm. Two of the works, Still Damp After Last Night’s Rain and The Mist Starts to Lift, are almost parallels to each other, with paths leading the viewer into the humming air of the countryside.

By James Dignan