Ey! Iran: Contemporary Iranian photography" (Dunedin Public Art Gallery)
The nation of Iran is frequently in the news, and mostly for the wrong reasons.
From these news reports we build up a skimmed, stereotypical image which speaks of our fundamental differences without attempting to point out our similarities.
It is left to large-scale art exhibitions like "Ey! Iran" to fill in the rest of the picture and paint the nation in a truer and more beneficial light.
The exhibition, showing at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, gathers work by Iranians living both in and beyond their country's borders.
The works are of diverse subjects and in a wide range of styles, but despite this, almost all of them speak of the humanity of both the subjects and the photographers.
The exhibition becomes a poignant link, showing us the similarities and differences between our two countries.
It is the portraits which have the most direct appeal.
The candid multiple-imaged works by Hana Mirjanian, showing browsing shoppers, and the well-composed family group depicted in Sadeh Tirafkan's Persuasion are impressive, as are more experimental works by Bahman Jalali and by Hossein and Angela Balamanesh.
Numerous street-scapes are also of note, as are the several video works on display.
"Interwoven", Vivian Keenan (Moray Gallery)
Vivian Keenan's latest exhibition combines various skills to create an intriguing whole.
In many of the works, basket-weaving techniques have been combined with sheet metal to produce woven sculptures.
The walls of the gallery are dotted with numerous small hearts and stylised Maori canoes created from copper wire and oxidised copper sheet respectively.
These objets d'art are charming - especially the waka - but they largely play a secondary role to the several series of large works which sit around them.
The first of these series is a group of teardrop-shaped rattan woven lamps, constructed in more organic shapes than the standard symmetries of traditional basketwork.
A second series of pieces consists of willow rods bound together with woven copper to create quivers and hinaki (eel traps).
It is the remaining two series, however, that stand out.
In both of these, copper ribbon has been woven using traditional Maori flax-weaving methods to produce strong sculptural items.
In one group, a series of female bodices has been created - unlikely as worn items but impressive as hanging sculptures.
In the final series, traditional Polynesian sail designs have been created from the copper weave.
These reach their - and the exhibition's - pinnacle with the large free-standing piece Sailing.
"The Safer Option", Philip James Frost (Temple Gallery)
Philip James Frost has produced another dystopian view of disintegrating society in his latest exhibition at the Temple Gallery.
The artist presents a series of works which build chaos from repetitive features, many of them symbolic of a society in disarray.
Bones, cigarette butts, and pills are depicted in gaudy rhythmic patterns, exemplified by the hand bone motif of Future Candy.
The works form two distinct groups - large repetitive collages, with images built up across the glued-together remnants of torn paper surfaces, and smaller, quieter works focusing on individual images.
Two works sit apart from these series, a large work featuring two rusting car bodies, and a medium-sized piece showing a chaotically psychedelic oil rig against a torn white sea.
It is these works and the smaller drawings which are the most successful, and display more clearly the artist's skills of drawing and composition.
The oil-rig piece (Tar 1) in particular repeatedly draws the eye, as does the exhibition's title work, a graphite drawing of a finger-pointing mob.
A third piece of note is Future Enjoyment with Death, a bright yet poignant future museum piece, with its glass case enclosing a human skeleton reassembled on all fours as if some future zoologist is unsure of the now-extinct human's stance.
