Art seen

"The Yallop and Smith Memorial Exhibition" (A Gallery)

[1] One wall of the Yallop and Smith exhibition.
There is no denying that Ray Yallop and Des Smith were major Dunedin arts personalities.

Patrons and collectors, their house overflowed with art from the Victorian to the modern, and the gatherings of artists that they hosted have passed into legend.

Smith died in early 2009, followed a year later by his partner, and it is fair to say that with their deaths an era of Dunedin's art scene ended.

It is fitting that A Gallery has decided to host a memorial exhibition featuring an eclectic mix of work, much of it from the couple's friends in Dunedin. More than 80 artists' work has created a wall-to-wall art display, hung in traditional style cheek by jowl around the gallery space.

The exhibition is unusual in two respects.

Firstly, it is evolving, with more work arriving to be displayed as the exhibition proceeds.

Secondly, the exhibited work - albeit mostly very fine work by diverse artists ranging from the respected and recognised to the little-known - is in some ways incidental.

The gallery itself is the focus, with the exhibition deliberately mimicking the couple's own living space, and as such, attempting to capture some of the spirit of the two art patrons. It is a memorial I am sure they would have appreciated.

"Exercising the Black Dog", Barry Cleavin (Brett McDowell Gallery) [2] Exercising the Black and Tan Dog I, by Barry Cleavin.
Barry Cleavin's latest exhibition at the Brett McDowell Gallery is a little different from the usual array of surreal punning prints for which the artist is well known.

In the current series of digital prints and aquatints, Cleavin has been inspired by the daily duty and exercise of walking a dog, a task which forms symbiosis of human and canine.

The walking can become a hypnotic and trancelike process, during which the eyes and mind of the human "walkee" wander to the interplay of light and shade.

For the master printmaker, the shadows and highlights have become an inspiration for a series of prints where figure and ground interact and reverse. In these, the dog becomes vague, only its shadow retaining a solid three-dimensional form.

Cleavin is also aware of the metaphor of "the black dog" for depression, an intangible yet all-too-solid mental form in which true and distorted reality interplay as much as light and shadow.

For many, walking provides a temporary respite from the mental gloom, as the exercising becomes exorcising.

The works show semi-abstract spectral canine figures and ominous shadows stretching across broken ground. They well display the printmaker's skills, and provide interestingly composed, complex images which appear different each time they are viewed.

"Never Before Shades", Toni Mackinnon (Milford Galleries Dunedin) [3] Rakuko II, by Toni Mackinnon.
Toni Mackinnon takes us back to an Op Art future with her exhibition "Never Before Shades" at Milford.

Mackinnon's art liberally appropriates from many of the artists active in that movement's heyday of the 1960s and the art's use in advertising, further acknowledging earlier work stretching back to the clean lines of Bauhaus poster art and surrealist photography's extreme close-ups.

The referencing is deliberate to the point that several of the pieces are named for the antecedent artists - Sonia is Sonia Delaunay, Kelly is Ellsworth Kelly, and so on.

The mixed-media works start with collage, from which base ink-jet print, drawing and gouache develop the theme. Lines have been left to show, giving clues to the processes used.

Colour is minimal, with only the barest touches of hue showing.

Many of the features of Mackinnon's work are originally taken from magazine images, manipulated primarily by juxtaposition, and leaving large areas of base white space.

This reduces the iconic nature of the visually quoted artworks, leaving them as mere facets of the new work, actors within an ensemble cast.

In this way, the juxtaposition and composition become the major features, with the source materials engaging both with each other and with their audience.

- James Dignan