(The Artist’s Room)
Catherine Garrett explores the scenery of Central Otago in a series of gentle landscape acrylics presented at The Artist’s Room.
Though hardly the scenery that Tom Petty would have associated with his song’s (and this exhibition’s) title, Otago well reflects a “great wide open”, and Garrett’s work effectively represents this aspect of the region. Images display both the rugged and more gentle side of our land, from Skipper’s Canyon to the more rolling hillside of the lower Clutha Valley, the latter being the area from which the artist originally hails. Both present day scenery and lost structures (such as the now submerged Old Cromwell Bridge) are depicted in the works.
The paintings show an artist evolving in style. Earlier works by Garrett were marked by a “stained glass window” look, zones of solid or slightly shaded colour separated by strong black divisions. In the current works, the black delineations are reduced in thickness and the natural shading of the hills is starting to become more dominant. There is still a vague but pleasant illustration-like feel to several of the pieces, especially those where rigid human-made structures are a focus, but a more painterly approach is also emerging, perhaps most clearly in the tarmac rushing beneath the vehicle from which the artist is viewing The Road Home — Gorge Creek.
(Gallery DeNovo)
DeNovo’s “Lustre” is a group show featuring artists whose work encompasses the use of metallic paint or leaf. A considerable number of artists are involved in the exhibition, the majority of them working in a primarily two-dimensional medium.
The works range in style, but the presence of golds and silvers provides a common thread. The use of the metallics ranges from them being the predominant colour, as in the two cast stone kaitiaki by Messini Palace and Kelvin Mann’s gold leaf homage to Chatham Island robin Old Blue, to its use as a highlight flourish, as in Sofia Minson’s powerful portrait Atua Wahine. Other than Palace’s work, the main sculptural items are Madeleine Child’s intriguing ceramic popcorn pieces.
Mel McKenzie cleverly uses gold as a false frame for her soft-focus townscapes, allowing colour to escape this boundary as if to enter the studio. Dean Raynbould draws on the spirit of Bill Hammond with his delightful and humorously surreal Dawn Chorus, one of the stars of the show. Ana Teofilo’s carved and painted structures add a fine touch of Pasifika flair to the display. Other works of note include an impressive landscape with golden hills by Juliet Best, large abstract resin totems by Rae West, and mixed media works by Anna Stichbury and Luke Calder.
(Hutch)
Neil Emmerson’s “Against Nature” is a compilation of one older and one new exhibition. The main section of work, itself titled “Against Nature” is an array of delicate sculptural forms, created from found plastic kitchenware. This is surrounded by excerpts from an older exhibition, “The Rape of the Lock”. Both series refer to the Decadent art movement of the 1880s and ’90s. The older works take as their basis two interwoven themes, those of British illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and Chinese revolutionary leader Lei Feng. Both men became poster boys for their respective, very different, cultural revolutions before dying young, with art and politics moving on to the “next big thing”.
The “Against Nature” works respond more laterally to the Decadent movement (primarily through their title, that of a major novel within the genre by J.K. Huysmans) but refer more specifically to the decadence of modern society in its wanton use of resources. Created from second-hand plasticware, they epitomise “use and throw away” culture by raising its detritus to the status of high art. The pieces are ironic, surreal and satirical — useless ornaments, deliberately mocking the forms of futuristic architecture or trophies for non-existent sports. And yet, and yet ... the lure of the colours and forms makes these kitsch paeans to modern waste splendid aesthetic objects.
