Art seen

Detail from "The Irony of the Death Threat from a Pro-Lifer", by Sam Ovens.

In response to A Gallery's other group show, Girlz, this all-male exhibition presents three voguish but incisive artists who are, over a three-week period, responding to their designated titles (draw, paint, and destroy).

In week one, Brisbane agitated the passivity of drawing with his moody collection of heavily worked, attitudinal portraits. Unframed and hugely expressive, the graphic renderings portray underground rogues donning tattoos, cigarettes and scars like rusty, hard-earned honours.

In week two, Ovens presented three triangular works which juxtapose graphic printed imagery with subverted icons on flamboyantly painted canvases. They are gutsy because they demonstrate not only intellectual alertness and a dissection of civic values but also the backbone to stridently declare malcontent. He conveys ideological irony while underscoring absurdity in his typically sardonic, but equally humorous style.

The final and much-awaited instalment of prints and spray-paint by Jones is to be revealed at the gallery tonight. Such a week-by-week structure compounds the conceptual dynamism of a display which is already politically loaded and culturally responsive, and while the exhibition is deliberately gender-biased, the overall communication thus far utterly derides archaic righteousness and mainstream masculinity.

One of Sue Novell's new works in the lobby of the University of Otago science library.

As part of the University of Otago's ongoing "Art on Campus" project, Sue Novell has been exhibiting new works in the lobby of the science library.

Inspired by the ever-changing nature of the human world-view - changes generated by advancements in visual technology - Novell has presented a looped DVD projection and several fragmented, satisfyingly vibrant canvas works, all of which were tailored specifically for the site.

The recorded loop is gentle and unassuming. It reveals manipulated digital photographs which, in their final forms, range from sparse cellular clusters in dreamy hues through to sharp geometric units. Hypnotic, the once-solid structures appear coolly algebraic but then, swiftly, they dissolve into mysterious seemingly arbitrary arrangements. The premise is the procedural transition from observable, material life into deconstructive abstraction via digital processing and, moreover, the simultaneity of wholeness and fragmentation. To clarify, the imagery shown is the product of the artist's zooming in on photographs at various rates, and to various ends, in both film and painted form.

The complexities which arise as the artist silently relates the generative impetus of life at a cellular level to the function of pixels in the digital field have to do with the ever-increasing synthesis between life and technology and the abstracted forms make for a quasi-synaesthetic exhibition.

"Wrangler", by Matt Gauldie.

As the name suggests, and in a manner which oozes Southern-man charm and untamed rurality, Matt Gauldie has brought to The Artist's Room six new rodeo-inspired, mixed-media works. This artist has a keen interest in both portraiture and genre painting and, as the official New Zealand Army artist these have become distinguished skills which are crucial to his practice.

Outside of the military sphere, Gauldie has recently produced five paintings and one sculpture in bronze. Three of the paintings have tin advertisements for Speight's, Wrangler and Gallagher respectively, riveted upon them to act as familiar backdrops for the utterly frenzied equestrian subjects. The works convey animated naturalism through dry, painterly brushstrokes which rest freely upon the canvas and the artist's handling of the oils seems inherently sculptural.

As ever, Gauldie has endowed both his sculpture and his large-scale paintings with gestural expressivity and vigorous energy, and his cattle-herding subjects are characteristically pensive.

There is an immediacy about this collection which is, and can only be, the result of extensive field work and intensive observational studies. To translate a fleeting moment into a sketch and that sketch into a masterwork, and to do so reliably, is a thorny set of transitions through which Gauldie evidently breezes.

- Franky Strachan.