Art Seen: August 11

A Tale of Teeth and Claws (detail), by Helen Back.

Helen Back is well known for her quirky sculptures of miniature people, caricatures which wear their inner darkness on fascinatingly ugly-beautiful faces.

In her latest exhibition at The Artist's Room, ''Immortality and Bus Stops'', she has taken these miniatures to a new and intriguing level, producing uniquely dark figures spiced with strong elements of black humour.

Back's caricatures have always had a slightly sinister aspect, reminiscent of Edward Gorey's cartoons and with the swirling mystery of the circus.

Her latest work produces and displays their twisted souls through the clever conceit of embedding glass globes in their chests, in which we see their inner nightmares.

Accompanied by delicious titles such as We think we know what happened to Ralf, the globes show scenes of alien abduction, of the darker side of fairy tales, and of the unlit path through the deepest forest.

Other works contain music box interiors, to be hand-wound to add a melancholy melodic thread to the narratives.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, skull-headed figures and diabolical performers present other dark fantasies, leavened somewhat by images of dreaming nuns waiting at lonely bus-stops, such as the one depicted in the exhibition's title piece, one of the finest of the works on display.

From Beginning to End, by Chris Heaphy.

Chris Heaphy's symbol-heavy art provides a strong, if subverted, chronology of New Zealand and its place in the world.

His large canvases use silhouette to present a multitude of figures - both human and animal - which suggests a narrative but does not spell one out.

Each work features a large central character in strong, solid black, its surface broken by the presence of Maori and European heads. Surrounding these are a host of smaller figures, each linking the work to others in the series.

In piece work, Toutouwai Waits the overlaid head is distorted to produce the bird's white chest feathers, and the symbol of the white feather and its historical use by Maori recurs throughout the exhibition.

Heaphy provides a commentary on the cross-fertilisation of ideas and cultures within New Zealand, the last major land mass to be both inhabited and colonised, and arguably one where the culture of coloniser and colonised has most approached a meeting of equals and healthy interchange.

The ambiguity of many of Heaphy's figures and the array of European and Maori tropes within the works hints at how far the process has come as well as pointedly commenting on how far there is still to go, and how much early colonists attempted to subsume rather than exchange cultures.

I’d Rather Be More (detail), by Connah Podmore.

‘‘Private Lodgings/I’d Rather Be More’’, Daegan Wells and Connah Podmore (Blue Oyster Art Space)

A dual exhibition celebrating the memory of place is under way at the Blue Oyster.

In the gallery's main space Daegan Wells reflects on what has been lost and gained as a result of the red-zoning of central Christchurch, concentrating on the former studio of noted artist Bill Sutton.

The studio has remained in a state of limbo, torn between the Earthquake Commission and Heritage New Zealand.

It sits in a dilapidated state surrounded by cleared land; like the remains of Chernobyl it is a time capsule within its own small no-go zone.

Wells has used photograph and quiet meditative video to show the overgrown gardens and the life which used to fill the place.

The second half of the exhibition moves closer to home, with Connah Podmore using text and stone to reflect on the paradoxical creative and destructive process which produced Tunnel Beach.

Poetic texts line the walls, yet these pieces are dual-edged - they can be read complete, or any crossed-out text can be ignored to produce a different reading.

The texts surround two half-destroyed cubes of Oamaru stone, the resulting rubble forming a complete work yet also implying the more pristine untouched blocks.

You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs; you cannot make a landmark without blasting rock.