"In Blue", Baden French
(Moray Gallery)
Dunedin artist Baden French presents a series of local landscapes at Moray Gallery. The exhibition, appropriately titled "In Blue", features the land and waters of coastal Otago under deep blue summer skies.
The works are a therapy process for the artist, coming back from a major health issue.
As part of his recovery, French was driven into the Otago countryside to soak up his surroundings, with the twin goals of progressing his recuperation and preparing ideas for an exhibition.
The 12 acrylics in the current display complete the second of those goals.
French’s images effectively capture Otago’s landscape with deft, loose brush strokes that give the pieces a strongly impressionistic air.
The choice of colours — rich blues, earthy browns and strong yellow-greens — lends the works an almost Australian feel while the scenes ground them firmly in southern New Zealand.
Images such as Looking Towards Taieri Mouth I are filled with vivid blues, bold stabs of white mingling with them to imply as much as depict wave and cloud.
The details are more specific in Looking Towards St Kilda, but here the foreground waters and wet sand dissolve into a kaleidoscope of lavenders and golds.
The exhibition is impressive, and hopefully the creation process has also gone some way towards returning the artist to full health.
(Milford Gallery)
Miranda Joseph’s debut solo exhibition at Milford also creates and is inspired by impressions of nature.
In Joseph’s case, the artist’s time living in Japan has drawn her to the traditional subject of cherry blossom.
Joseph’s aim is not to accurately depict blossoms, but to immerse the viewer in the trees, surrounding us with light.
The paintings, heady with pearlescent and metallic paints, shift and move as the changing light hits their surfaces.
We become part of the scene, rather than the more traditional art situation where the viewer looks at the works from the outside.
The paintings are created in a multi-stage process involving using a paint roller over a sanded white base to create a slightly random background, over which the artist applies drops of masking medium.
Further painting is followed by the addition of thick acrylic gel, creating a three-dimensional surface upon which patterns of dots and oval shapes are added with reflective paints.
The resulting works ripple in the light as it plays across the uneven canvas.
The paintings are multi-layered, metaphorically as well as physically, and speak of the changing seasons, and particularly environmental change.
Poignantly, blossom festivals, despite their thousand-year history, are no more immune to climate change than the rest of us.
(Blue Oyster Art Project Space)
Blue Oyster Art Project Space’s latest exhibition, "anamnesis", by Aliyah Winter, takes us on a journey to discover the poetic side of pain.
Using a text-based computer journey (similar in many ways to early computer text adventure games), the viewer is taken through a series of richly coloured digital landscapes, each accompanied by lines of poetry.
An interactive adventure, clicking on words on the screen opens up a lattice-like network of criss-crossing paths through which we move deeper into a secret visual and literate world.
While the inspiration for the work is our relationship with the experience of pain, the work itself holds no terrors or shocks, but is rather a meditative self-questioning of our understanding of pain’s sensations and their effect on our memories of it.
We feel as if we are being drawn deep into the body as we watch and interact with the programme, viewing the rich amorphous coloured worlds becoming almost like travelling within our own veins and nerves.
The work is simple yet effective and ultimately thought-provoking.
The poetic meditations lead the viewer to re-examine pain for what it is — an unpleasant yet necessary part of the overall experience of life.
