Art seen: Monochrome marvels

James Dignan reviews the latest exhibitions from around Dunedin.

'Point, Western Lake Wairarapa', by Wayne Barrar.

Barrar's latest exhibition explores the other end of the photographic spectrum from the glossy digital images he recently displayed at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. These 15 images utilise the painstaking methods of early photography - toned monochrome works on hand-coated papers from large-format negatives.

The exhibition's title, "Contact Topographies" has several connotations. The works are contact prints, in that they have been created by the direct laying of negatives on to paper without the use of an enlarger.

It also speaks of early colonial records of contact with the new land depicted. The images also show Barrar's interest in the marking of the pristine land by human contact. Usually this marking is detrimental, though occasionally there is an enhancement of the landscape.

The exacting nature of the processes show Barrar's skills as both chemist and artist, and by extension the abilities of 19th-century photographers. They also show that something has been lost in modern photography.

There is a preciseness in the image, and a warmth that comes with the slight haloing when light falls off towards the edge of the frame.

These images are memorable for the carefully chosen image, the skill of the creative process, and the beauty of the finished product.

'The Dog Blue', by Helen Back.

A troika of talent is on display at the Artist's Room, with a group show focusing on the human form. The three artists arrive at their conclusions in different ways, yet their results are complementary.

Of the three, Donna Demente is arguably the best known, and her work shows great style and polish. Her Renaissance-inspired close-up faces have the feel of religious frescoes and icons, and the icon-like status of the images is emphasised by the heavy gilt frames which surround many of the pieces.

Two works even take the idea one stage further; painted within small shuttered window frames they deliberately echo the appearance of altarpieces.

Sue Syme has exhibited with Demente before at this venue. Her works nicely complement Demente's and also form a bridge to the whimsical statuary of Helen Back. Syme's images do not focus on the face as portrait, but rather present dynamic groups of actors performing their arcane daily routines. The caricatured forms have both a subtle humour and a sinuous, serpentine grace.

Helen Back's small ceramic figures complete the exhibition. Here the humour is overt, with a joyful array of gleeful devils and oversized Boschian animals. Memorable among these is the pathos-filled Dog Blue, a pitiful beast chained to the leg of a chair.

Bewildering Scheme (detail), by Joe Worley.

The Blue Oyster also presents a trio of artists, but here the works are disparate. In the lower gallery Melissa Laing studies our efforts to seek safety. The mixed-media display is dominated by a wall of damaged aircraft black boxes, opposite which are sketched images of dead birds, the "bird strikes" which no safety checks can totally eradicate.

Between the two sits a desk and notepad, a reminder of the repeated obsessive checklists tallied in a psychological attempt to master chaos.

Further through the gallery, Joe Worley has created a mural of jarring lines and patterns. Based on patterns used by World War 1 navies to confound enemy assessments of ship distance and speed, the designs are an attempt to bend our perceptions of the room's perpendiculars into new angles.

The highlight of the displays is Roger Boyce and Marie Claire Brehaut's "Nature Morte". This presents a conflation of artist's studio and illegal drug lab, simultaneously commenting on their similarities and differences.

The studio is a place to create illusion; the lab creates a means to false reality. Both use chemicals to alter and potentially brighten or darken the worlds of their clients. The lab is further removed from reality by appearing as a still life and memento mori on the artist's easel.