James Dignan takes a look at the latest exhibitions around Dunedin.
Geoff Williams' work is always impressive.
By a painstaking process of crosshatching, he produces images that are simultaneously photographically realistic and imbued with a magical, glowing soft focus.
In his current exhibition, Williams has turned his focus to a wistful memory-laden collection of childhood toys, many of them of considerable vintage.
The tinplate locomotives and dolls are gently but immaculately presented, often with a subtle humorous touch, as in the image of a rubber duck sailing along a bench top against a blue "sky" of paper bag, or the mildly iconoclastic image of three kewpie dolls, seemingly crucified on toy windmills.
Three graphite works accompany the paintings.
Though these works seem modest against their colourful neighbours, it is in these works that Williams' deft hand is often most evident.
Cleverly, many of the works have been displayed alongside the depicted toys.
This allows the viewer to compare and contrast the real with the image, and perhaps analyse what changes have resulted in the artist creating the magical unreality with which he has imbued the works.
One painting, that of a Jan McLean doll, indicates a new direction towards portraiture, a move emphasised by Williams's recent prize-winning work at the Dunedin Art Awards.
The spirit of Mexico has invaded De Novo.
Inspired by time spent in Arizona and trips south across the border, Kirsten Lovelock has created narrative works stressing the faith of the Mexican people and the cultural identity which is constantly under threat from the country's powerful neighbour.
Lovelock tells of how her first trip south shattered several naive illusions of small-town Mexico.
The villages she saw were not redolent with the folk art for which the country is well known, but were instead small drab service towns, - poorer than, but otherwise not unlike, those north of the border.
The faith of the exhibition's title is central to these works - not simply Christianity, but the hopes and fears of people everywhere and the means through which they get through their daily lives.
In some works, not surprisingly, a faint Kahloesque quality appears, most obviously in a work comparing the lace traditional costumes of Tehuana native and Spanish colonial.
In a series of dusty-coloured paintings and Perspex-encased tableaux, icons have been created.
These have been inspired as much by Polynesian themes and Byzantine church images as by Mexico.
An analogy is clearly drawn between Mexico's relationship with the United States and the Pacific Islands' relationship with New Zealand.
In his latest loosely-themed series of paintings, also at De Novo, Frank Gordon presents another ebullient view of life around Dunedin.
With his easy-going style, eye for the witty detail, and Chagall-like capturing of everyday mundane magic, the artist presents 10 more scenes inhabited by frame-filling, larger-than-life locals.
By sheer coincidence, if the ghost of Frida Kahlo can be discerned in some of Kirsten Lovelock's work downstairs, so too can the spirit of Kahlo's husband Diego Rivera be seen in some of Gordon's crowd scenes.
This is particularly true with the busy, densely-structured Work and Income NZ (with dogs), a work which is crying out for full-wall Rivera mural treatment.
It is the whimsy of the ordinary as extraordinary, or the ordinary pitted against the extraordinary, which provide the humour in these works.
In The Dunedin festival of too much water, rising seas are challenged by the march of a Highland piper.
In another work, the escaped tiger causing havoc is merely an advertising logo.
Elsewhere, Gordon's gift is his ability to nail a perfect caricature of a facial expression, allowing the pathos and bathos of the humdrum settings to be revealed.
The delightful The book club is a prime example of this skill.
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