Art seen

<i>Black crawled zig-zag bottle,</i> by John Parker

There is more than a touch of stagecraft in the ceramic art of John Parker.

Using the barest minimum of colour and a repetitive array of forms, the works form a hypnotic display, the pots and enigmatic cones becoming the characters of a play, or pieces in some occult game. As always with Parker's work, the ceramic itself is of high quality, with fine hand-crafted forms glowing with the lustre of the glaze.

The interplay of the pieces, both with each other and with the spaces and shadows between them, has long been a fascination of Parker. The items have a distinct presence, enhanced by their staging and the gallery lighting, such that it is as if, by walking through the gallery, you are disturbing their space.

In this display colour has been drawn back to bold primary red, white, and black. This enables form to come to the fore, yet also allows the three colour groups to play off each other. This is most noticeable among those works which feature induced craquelure - a gleaming white surface covered by a thin, cracked black skin. These pieces appear as if in transition; the effect is almost of a white butterfly emerging from a black chrysalis, or a snake sloughing off its old dead skin.

<i>Cadillac</i>, by Michael O'Kane

Mike O'Kane has delved deep into the recesses of childhood to pull out the inspiration for his exhibition at Inge Doesburg's gallery.

A chance encounter with a box of toy cars in a secondhand shop sparked memories of childhood play and fantasy of the models as real vehicles. O'Kane used the collection as the basis for a series of photomontages in which close-up images of the toys have been composited into Otago landscapes and streetscapes.

The Matchbox toys, much prized in their heyday (and still so by collectors) may be a little worse for wear, but they still bear enough likeness to the real thing that there is an initial acceptance of the images as real, followed by a sharp mental dissonance as it becomes obvious that the vehicles are miniatures. Great care has been taken by the artist to ensure the toys fit naturally and perfectly into the backgrounds, the lighting and accompanying shadows in particular providing a major challenge.

The images nicely capture the joy of the photographer in both the toys and the Otago landscape, while simultaneously providing both a wistful reminiscence of childhood past and a tongue-in-cheek reference to the idea of cars as ''big boys' toys''.

<i>Dentists on Holiday,</i> by Nick Austin

Cars moving through the countryside also play a part in Nick Austin's eclectic exhibition at the Hocken. Created during the artist's year as 2012 Francis Hodgkins Fellow, many of the works show stages along a journey - physical, desired, or secondhand through the artifice of mail.

Many of the two-dimensional works presented use the fetish of the mailed envelope, hitchhiking its way across a stark painting-as-Google-Street-View landscape. In other pieces the envelopes travel in an inner, mental landscape, circling the viewer as threatening paper sharks. The use of this repeated throwaway motif is vaguely reminiscent of 19th-century artist Max Klinger, who created through art an imaginary journey of a discarded glove.

The large three-dimensional works which form part of this exhibition are perhaps more effective. Notable among these is the installation of two small coffee tables, bowing under the weight of a massively outsized mug. This provides a stark yet humorous point of departure for the viewer's journey around the gallery. More thought-provoking still is the sombre installation ''Dentists on Holiday'' with its incongruous mix of sinister dental chair and cheap holiday slideshow and soundscape. Oddly for an exhibition which ostensibly seems to focus on holidays, it - like several of the other works - produces a strongly claustrophobic effect.