In this week's Art Seen, Robyn Maree Pickens looks at exhibitions from Milford Galleries, Julian Smith, and Motoko Kikkawa.
‘‘Aurora’’ (Milford Galleries, Dunedin)
With the holiday season traditionally functioning as an extended hiatus for many art galleries, ``Aurora'' at Milford Galleries is a considered and refined exhibition of paintings and sculpture in a variety of media by artists the gallery represents.
As a group exhibition, it is more than a straightforward reprise of last year's highlights, with not just (some) new work by existing artists in the gallery's stable, but also new artists to the gallery, including Port Chalmers local Anya Sinclair, whose large paintings inspired by Ross Creek sound a perfect pitch between figuration and abstraction.
Poised between two landscape paintings (oil on aluminium) by Simon Edwards, is a large sculpture by Chris Charteris in andesite stone.
The jagged edges of the cross motif cut into the stone chime with similarly urgent brushstrokes in Edwards' paintings. Other companionable relationships between works abound, such as the vertical sweep of Lonnie Hutchinson's detailed cutouts made from building paper, Darkness (2016), with another sculptural work by Charteris that resembles a giant necklace, Rangimarie (2016).
There are many captivating works on display, but it is always hard to beat the insistence of flashing lights. These figure prominently in Hannah Kidd's large sculptural text work in which the lights flicker between the vertical stack of three words (and the work's title): Tough Guy Huh? (2016).
‘‘Biblia, Piibli, Paipera: The Bible in Translation’’ (Reed Gallery, Dunedin Public Library)
Serving to illustrate the many languages into which the Bible has been translated, curator Julian Smith chose ``Bible'' in three languages: Biblia (Latin), Piibli (Estonian), and Paipera (Te Reo), as the title for this fascinating exhibition of bibles.
The oldest, some 700 years old, is a Latin Vulgate from 13th-century England, while the most recent translation was printed in 2013, in the Austronesian language of Moronene, Indonesia, of which there are only 37,000 speakers.
Displayed over 23 cabinets, the 50-odd bibles are grouped according to geographical area. In addition to the expected range of European language bibles (German, French, Italian, Latin, Dutch, Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Welsh), there are cabinets dedicated to translations of the Bible in Middle Eastern, African, Latin American (indigenous and Spanish), Asian, and Pacific Island languages, and even Esperanto.
For those viewers not drawn to the Bible as a religious text the exhibition easily appeals to one's historical sense; to that peculiar experience of realising that one is looking at an object that is 700 years old; imagining all the hands that have thumbed the pages, and in today's world of fleeting moments, that such an artefact is still extant and legible.
For those interested in elaborate typography and woodcut illustrations, this exhibition is well worth a visit.
‘‘Shortsighted Girl’s Very Thick Wall’’, Motoko Kikkawa (Blue Oyster Art Project Space)
Blue Oyster has launched its 2017 programme with a solo commission of predominantly new work by Tokyo-born, Dunedin-based artist Motoko Kikkawa.
Comprising installation, short film and sound works, and performance, ``Shortsighted Girl's Very Thick Wall'' is the first major solo exhibition of Kikkawa's work.
Kikkawa has been a fixture in Dunedin's sound and experimental art communities since 2004, and this exhibition provides a significant opportunity to engage with the range of her practice.
Over the summer, Kikkawa has had the opportunity to upscale her traditionally small-scale watercolour and black ink works thanks to the use of Blue Oyster's large back studio space. Time and space have enabled Kikkawa to create the installation of four large horizontal painted drawings propped up by wooden hinges that occupy the front gallery in a partition-like formation, one behind the other.
Despite using watercolour with black ink throughout, Kikkawa has nevertheless created four distinct compositions that range from organic to loosely geometric. She has painstakingly worked black ink into the watercolour to create small areas of figurative detail and potential narratives among typically abstract mark-making.
In addition to the staccato quality of Kikkawa's short film and sound works in the back gallery, a second performance piece will take place at the gallery on Saturday, February 25 (3-4pm).
-By Robyn Maree Pickens