Art seen: Family tensions

'The BBQ' by Roy Almond.

"Double Vision/Views from my Studio" by Manu Berry and Roy Almond (Bellamy's Gallery).

Two complementary displays of woodcut prints by Manu Berry and Roy Almond are on show at Bellamys Gallery.

Berry's work is well known in Dunedin, though the artist now lives and works in Wellington.

His latest exhibition is an intriguing change of direction, with Berry using a novel approach to add a third dimension to his prints.

Several sheets have been printed with the same woodcut, with stencilled outlines removed from some to be overlaid with the same shape offset from others.

This produces curious yet effective collaged works, with the spaces and layers suggesting differing perspectives on the landscape.

In some of these works such as Intuitive commands, the effect is to evoke the ghosts of past or future events.

Almond's work is more straightforward, but also effective.

In the artist's first exhibition for many years, strong, well-composed woodcut prints have been assembled, using as their subject matter local scenes and impressions of groups or individuals at their work or leisure.

The individual and group portraits in particular are very effective, with gesture and character impressively captured in prints such as The BBQ and Studio practice.

"Focus on a Frozen Land" Andris Apse (Otago Museum)

Andris Apse is a landscape photographer long known for his ability to capture the untouched emptiness of the New Zealand landscape.

A visit to the Antarctic has allowed him to give full rein to his love of open vistas, and the fruits of this visit are on display at Otago Museum.

The photographer's technical abilities and sense of what makes a fine composition have come to the fore in these works.

The use of a wide panoramic format has enhanced many of the images, and allowed Apse to capture the sheer vastness of the landscape in images such as Cape Bird II.

The Antarctic is, by and large, a monochromatic world, and Apse has used this to his advantage, relying solely on texture, shadow, and on subtle tints and shades to record the continent's changing moods.

In McMurdo Sound, for example, the gentle pink hue of the clouds adds atmosphere and depth to what might otherwise have remained a flat image.

The few images of wildlife are no less impressive including one notable wide-angle view of a rank of penguins though it is the images of the open landscape which remain in the mind after leaving the exhibition.

"Aural Hysteric" by Emma Morgan and "Onward!" by Kate Boocock (Blue Oyster Gallery).

The Blue Oyster Gallery is showing two intriguing exhibitions by Emma Morgan and Kate Boocock in its rooms in Moray Pl.

Morgan's exhibition is an audiovisual piece inspired by the tensions within the artist's extended family.

By use of soundtracks and slideshows the artist examines the dilemma of the opposing forces which keep us in a home while also threatening to drive us from it.

By building up a series of vignettes, both auditory and visual, Morgan presents literal and figurative melodramatic snapshots of a family in disrepair.

The result is both a cathartic therapy for the artist and a historiography - an examination of the nature of history and an examination of how every chronicle shows its chronicler's bias.

Kate Boocock's exhibition is more straightforward, an examination of Dunedin as it may appear in a post-consumerist, post-global warming, sustainable future.

Titled ironically after the former motto of New Zealand, it consists of a roughly assembled model of the city created using household waste, the peaks of Mount Cargill and Flagstaff rising from above a raised sea and drowned plain.

The art acts as a living sketch of the future, not a detailed blueprint, and suggests by its incompleteness that we all need to think about what we will be adding to this hypothetical future Dunedin.