(Bellamys Metro)
Dunedin is seeing an upturn in the number of new central city galleries, the newest of the lot being an urban gallery for Macandrew Bay’s Bellamys. The Moray Pl art space is ostensibly designed to fill in while the Bellamy’s Bay gallery is being renovated, but it already seems like a permanent fixture.
The opening exhibition for the space features both new and familiar work. The images are each accompanied by a piece of poetry or prose, many of them part of this year’s "Micro + Art" call-and-response multimedia presentation.
As always, Manu Berry and Pauline Bellamy provide highlights, Bellamy’s washes of thick acrylic evoking the land effectively and Berry’s woodcuts being strong and attractive. Their works are accompanied by words by Anny Trolove, Lynda Scott Araya, and Diane Brown, among others. Brown’s words in particular are both affective and effective.
Kate Stevens West also presents several intriguing works, her style melding elements from Māori tradition (Old Ones) and the whimsical surrealism of Chagall (You and Me). Zoe Thompson Moore’s installation piece seems a little at odds with much of the exhibition, but finds connection with two mixed media works, one by John Bellamy and one collaborative piece by Manu Berry and Cassie R-S. Overall, the display makes for a strong opening exhibition.
Nearby in Moray Pl, Hutch presents an exhibition by Polly Gilroy.
Gilroy’s work ostensibly focuses on the play of light, colour, and form, yet subverts the normal relationship between these three parameters and the painted surface.
Rather than beginning with a canvas or similar ground, the artist has used her surfaces — light silk — as a muting agent, placing them over a painted base. Instead of seeing images coalescing from forms on the surface of the work, Gilroy’s work forces us to focus on the structure of the timber and boards which make up the stretchers and frames of the work.
What appear at first to be gentle washes of paint or ink on the surface of the silk are the work’s infrastructure. The silk itself retains its original pale solid colour, whether white, yellow, or blue. The patterns we perceive "on the surface" are the wood upon which the silk is stretched, the shadowy forms we perceive being the shapes of this substrate. Our focus moves from the usual surface work to examine the shapes of the artworks and the girders of their construction.
Within this metaphorical and literal framework, we are left with attractive pastel colourfield abstractions, exemplified by the soft geometries of the various Light Vestiges pieces.
(Pond Gallery)
Pond’s exhibition "Ngako" is a group show, with many of the pieces tangentially connected with food ("ngako" being a Māori term for fat), and with changes brought to Māori and Pasifika people as a result of urbanisation.
Ron Bull and Simon Kaan present a food-related interactive work, in which leafy twigs are dipped in food by gallery visitors. Once emptied, the twigs are placed in a dead miniature forest. The installation reflects a tale of Māori cast into exile, with twigs being the only available food.
Isaiah Okeroa’s Sleep Out is a traditionally inspired rug of flax and cabbage tree fibres, raised vertically to become a screen, on which is displayed a video of a completely different use of fats: the application of makeup. The ambiguous appearance of the images on the rough screen bring to mind traditional Pacific tattooing as much as it represents the cosmetic amplification of gender in all its forms.
Isabella Lepoamo provides the highlight of the exhibition with her view of traditional and adapted diet.
Most notable among these items is a series of tapa-inspired images of sea life inked on to oil-stained paper which had been used as wrapping for fish and chips. The many layered meaning — commercialised fishing, oil pollution, and a move to less healthy diet — is apposite.
By James Dignan
