''Echo'', Merilyn Wiseman (Milford Galleries Dunedin)
Merilyn Wiseman's delicate, elegant ceramic vessels sit like actors upon a stage.
Their forms, created from glazed white earthenware, are each imbued with their own characteristics, revealed as much by the play of light upon them as by the forms themselves.
The result is not so much of a display of inanimate vases as of living, breathing characters.
The bold natural heart and teardrop shapes, and the extravagant handles of these flattened vessels almost seem like self-parodies, so strongly pronounced are the characteristics of the works.
Excellently modelled from a strong monochromatic white clay, the textures come directly to the viewer's attention.
The rippled, dotted, and droplet-coated surfaces almost dare the viewer to touch and caress the objects, as do the deliberately caricatured feminine forms of some of the vertical teardrop vessels, such as Echo Vase 13.
The display is of works which are simultaneously simple, yet vibrant in their very nature, the combination working to great aesthetic effect.
Together, they form an impressive array, each playing off its neighbour.
Individually, the works dominate their surroundings, the interplay of light and shadow across each vessel's surface and environs providing it with a fine fluid personal space.
''Who Opens the Door'', Annie Mackenzie and Dave Marshall (Blue Oyster Art Project Space)
There is a coming-together of the apparently haphazard and the carefully arranged in Mackenzie and Marshall's ''Who Opens the Door''.
On first examination, the articles displayed seem aleatory - a rug, a hand towel, a hanging tarpaulin, a bucket.
On closer examination the works are not what they initially seem.
There is a deliberate Zen-like arrangement, and the simple articles have been carefully crafted from unexpected materials: the rudimentary bucket and apparently chewed watermelon rind are fired pottery, the limp towel is hand-woven in traditional Southeast Asian style.
There is effort here to reflect on the impact of Westernisation on Eastern culture, and to make pointed comment on the reflexive impact of cheap mass-produced Asian goods on Western society.
Here, apparently mass-produced objects have been reproduced by means of traditional craft, subverting the instant-gratification, plastic-pressed lifestyle.
The subversion takes a further twist in the presentation of a cloister room, lit as if an ancient temple by means of tea-light candles suspended in aluminium cans, the epitome of consumer society.
Several of the items on display are interactive, none more charmingly so than the simple fountain, in which water falls from a holed ceramic vessel on to the etched stone below.
''Colour is Vision's Amphetamine'' (Mint Gallery)
Mint's latest exhibition, ''Colour is Vision's Amphetamine'', is an eclectic but possibly mistitled display from four painters and one poet.
The exhibition is mistitled inasmuch as only two of the creative forces involved provide their mental stimulation primarily through colour.
Michael Morley, better known for his sound installations, is represented by two large-scale abstract canvases, the more impressive of which (Alien) presents bold areas of yellow and red against a claustrophobic grey structure reminiscent of cell-door bars.
More colourful still are the works of German artist Daniel M. Thurau, with a series of gaudy naive expressionist works on paper.
While the colour is limited to these two artists, the other works provide considerable adrenaline.
Ben Webb has created several muted ink works which show their photographic origins, the silver and sepia tones given extra impetus by the deliberate distressing of the initial images.
Colour is rejected almost totally in the palimpsest-like canvas of Scott Flanagan, its white field marked only gently by faint forms and by the uneven coatings of the surface.
Finally, Peter Olds presents an ink-etched poem which perhaps sums up the exhibition with its suggestion that any colour, any view, is simply the work of our unreliable minds, and that what we see may bear no relation whatsoever to the truth.
