"Hauaga (Arrivals)", John Pule (Dunedin Public Art Gallery)
"Hauaga (Arrivals)" is a major retrospective of the work of Pacific Island artist John Pule.
Raised in Auckland, Pule reconnected with his Niuean heritage to produce a synthesis of traditional Polynesian and modern New Zealand art, coloured by knowledge of the colonially viewed false exotica of South Seas culture.
Pule's early canvases reflect hiapo [tapa] bark cloth art, but with a personal symbolism encompassing influences from Gauguin to McCahon and Fomison.
A significant number of works include text and images drawn from Pule's poetry, much of which stands strongly in its own right.
The effect has echoes of the collaborative works of Hotere and Tuwhare.
In the late 1990s, there was a dramatic shift in style, with organic hiapo grids replaced with more open, atmospheric "cloud" works such as Another Green World.
These culminate in the mammoth Kehe tau hauaga foou.
Here, vines hang from coloured cumuli over heavily worked backgrounds teeming with life.
Clouds hang over the thought-island vines like the clouds which from a distance indicate the Heaven of coral atolls in the Pacific's vastness, or the Hell of nuclear mushroom clouds.
Pule's more recent work integrates the earlier and later forms into strong monochromatic paintings which reintroduce the structure of the hiapo while retaining the free, turbulent landscapes of the cloud works.
"Terror Firma", Liz Rowe and Anya Sinclair (The Artist's Room)
False exotica also informs Liz Rowe's art.
Her attractive, gaudy landscapes are redolent of the vistas of biscuit-tin kitsch.
While clearly Kiwi scenes, they are generic - a mass-produced New Zealand.
The lurid, kitset style of paint-by-numbers is knowingly evoked to further emphasise the commerciality of the scene depicted.
This is an unnatural tourist image, simultaneously as relevant and irrelevant as a plastic tiki.
Rowe's work is coupled with that of Anya Sinclair, and the two are complementary in both their similarities and opposites.
At first glance, it is the opposites which are apparent in the art - Rowe's emphatically bright, Sinclair's obstinately sombre.
Colours have leached away and impenetrable mists hang above the dense primordial rainforests of Sinclair's images.
Yet this dark, subconscious forest stretching into wild infinity is as unreal as Rowe's dappled meadows.
It is an archetype of New Zealand, drawn more from our minds than from the true land.
The pun of the exhibition's title is telling.
This is not terra firma but terror firma, the unsettling, unreal land which lies in our imaginations.
It is a New Zealand which is either too bright or too untamed, unreal and never existing in such form, but strongly held in our abstract mental images of the land.
"The Rose Papered Room", Diana Smillie (Temple Gallery)
At first sight, "The Rose Papered Room" may seem a step into more tranquil waters for Diana Smillie.
The artist's previous works, with their brutal allegories of relationship games of power and control, have given way to a studied, unquiet detente.
The leopard's claws are retracted (though still clearly present) and the alpha-male minotaur has departed, leaving a claustrophobic, threatening calm.
This is not, however, a step back from the brink, but rather the result of a plunge beyond it, into the turbulent, sticky whirlpool of depression.
Smillie spent three months in mental dark depths, using her painting as a catharsis and means of analysing and gaining perspective on her condition.
The result is a series of powerful works which lay bare the illness and the stigma which so often accompanies it.
The artist describes depression as perversely comforting, a claustrophobic cocoon punctuated by occasional "flare-ups of anxiety and self-loathing", the introspective mental space well-described by Paul Simon in the song I Am A Rock.
In Smillie's art, this mental womb becomes the blood-red, rose-papered room, constricting yet self-focusing, a place where a person is held in stasis along with their hopes and fears, agonisingly distant and threateningly close respectively.
