The marriage of sight and sound has long been a source of intriguing multimedia art, yet it is only in the past 50 or so years that it has really come into its own. The freedom that conceptual and concrete art have allowed the visual artist, and the similar freedoms allowed to sonic artists through recording and synthesizer technology have opened the door to a fruitful and seemingly limitless creative form.
In a major, sprawling exhibition covering much of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, current trends in antipodean sonic art are examined. More than a dozen installations are present, ranging from Thembi Soddell's Window, into which the viewer crawls to sit in thrumming darkness, to Michael Graeve's exploration of positive and negative space and their auditory analogies, sound and silence.
David Haines and Joyce Hinterding's audience-participation Monocline: Black boxes, with its pairing of immersive artificial landscape and video-game technology, is also of note, as are the videotaped "scream performances" by Kusum Normoyle. The implied bruit of Marco Fusinato's riot scene overwhelms the viewer from the gallery's Big Wall.
The works are, by and large, intriguing and challenging. Three video pieces in particular caught this reviewer's eye, most notably Brent Grayburn's dark, brooding Flicker, its mysterious narrative made nightmarish by its subharmonic aural backdrop.
Spring bulbs are frozen, ready to bloom at the Blue Oyster. Yet, the flowers, perpetually locked in stillness, are enclosed not in flower bulbs but in the shells of light bulbs. Roses, and other less-pleasing contents, are held in perpetual timelessness.
The pendulous husks of light are arrayed alongside other items that look at the frozen moment. Working from the basis of T.S. Eliot's poem Burnt Norton, with its themes of the Christian concept of time, the artist has pondered the duality of motion and stillness, prayer and pragmatism, and the occasionally overlapping nature of disparate religions.
Other works within the exhibition include delicate figurines of the Virgin Mary created from mustard seed, an item used in parables for strength in Christianity and the inevitability of death in Buddhism. A tower of translucent dominoes containing snippets of rejection letters occupies the other end of the gallery. Here, the tower of hubris and chance is revealed in all its shakiness.
The artist has responded to the intangible nature of time in various intriguing ways, not least of which - and not to be overlooked - are the artist's exhibition notes, in the form of the heavily annotated words of Eliot's poem. This satisfyingly completes a thought-provoking exhibition.
Phillip Edwards has chosen subject matter well-matching his talents in an exhibition at Gallery De Novo. The soft lapping of waters against boat hulls and waterside sheds is perfectly suited to the artist's ability to trigger wistful emotion and a sense of timelessness.
The scenes are a change from the Oamaru streetscapes for which the artist is perhaps best known locally. In his latest series, he has moved south to depict the battered water's-edge structures of Karitane and Otago Harbour. The same eye for detail remains, and the play of light on water and weathered wood gives Edwards ample opportunity to show his skills. The one non-coastal scene, a stand of peninsula macrocarpas, is equally strong, and shows an eye for the architectural structure of the trees.
Edwards' acrylics are gently muted in a way not often associated with the medium, and it is to his credit that the works almost appear to be painted in thin oil glaze rather than in the often harsher polymer.
The artist has mastered the difficult knack of being able to paint reflection on water and the gravel and silt beneath the surface without making the combination seem artificial, and has created a strong and attractive group of works.
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