Art seen

"Spectrum", Catherine Garrett, Emma Butler, and Philippa Bentley (The Artist's Room)

[1] Puriri Moth, by Philippa Bentley.
The Artist's Room's exhibition "Spectrum" presents works by a troika of women, their works complementing each other both in mood and in palette.

Catherine Garrett and her works are well known to Artist's Room regulars, and in this exhibition she has produced a twist on her usual art.

While retaining the fierce black lines and bright panes which make her images reminiscent of stained glass, here her paintings focus on the still life rather than the landforms of Otago. Each of the paintings is simple yet clear, and the resulting images have a warmth and gentle immediacy.

Expatriate English artist Emma Butler's works form a narrative, their lone heroine living in a world of autumnal tones and gentle whimsical fantasy, filled with birds and butterflies.

The images have a pleasing, playful cartoon-like quality, which well suits the subject. Many of her works are attractive oil pastels, supplemented by a handful of larger acrylic works.

Butterflies and other insects form a major focus for Philippa Bentley's images. These museum-crisp studies focus on surreal media-moths and industrial gadflies, their precise insect forms bedecked in kiwiana advertising.

The works are initially screenprinted, with the resulting outlines hand painted in bright invertebrate reds and greens.

"Cabinet of Curiosities", Craig Freeborn, Dan Roberts, Mariya Semenova, and Anne-Mieke Ytsma (Blue Oyster Art Space) 

[2] Unicorn Skeleton, by Dan Roberts.
There is a cabinet of curiosities buried within the Blue Oyster Gallery. In this small space, an alternative view of an alternative timeline is being played out, of a fanciful, prehistoric Dunedin which may or may not have existed.

The exhibit is deliberately designed as an obsessive Victorian museum archive, a miniature animal attic in the basement, turning scientific theories on their head by playing them against each other.

Curator Suzanne Claessen has chosen to eschew artist's names on works, presenting the exhibit as a mental exploration of the whole concept of the naturalist's world, a world of a rigorous self-sustaining framework of theory.

Viewers are thus allowed to see legend and science hard up against each other, enabling us to explore the points where they overlap and blur, without the risk of breaking the illusion of artifice.

The skeletal unicorn and sketches of prehistoric cave art give us glimpses of a non-past that we must piece together much like early palaeontologists who constructed creatures from scant evidence, in one case famously presenting an iguanodon thumb bone as a nose horn.

The question of the borderline between accepted fact and scientific speculation, and the necessity of filling in the gaps with our own schema is thus brought into focus.

"To Scale, Everyday Sovereign", Lived Space (Rice and Beans Gallery) 

[3] To Scale, Everyday Sovereign, by Lived Space.
Where the Blue Oyster is examining our perception of archaeology and history, the Lived Space collective is similarly exploring our concepts of nationhood.

The idea of the micronation has become popular in recent years, with individuals or groups claiming their own sovereignty over real physical territory or through the metaphorical confines of cyberspace.

Through these nation-concepts, their creators are able to explore exactly what makes up sovereignty, create their own private club, or simply have a bit of fun at the expense of international politics.

Some of the unreal real estate of micronational identity is purely frivolous; other micronations have serious purpose.

The gallery's main space has been transformed into The Embassy of The People's Republic of Rice and Beans, making it an installation, a discussion space, and a waiting room for some unpredictable future state.

The flag of the republic (blue, featuring a rice grain and a bean) hangs from the ceiling, and under it people may sit to contemplate the psychogeographical concepts which bind us together as nations or separate us from the main.

The idea is intriguing, and some of the thoughts engendered may be compelling or thorny; whether it falls squarely within the increasingly vague definitions of art is another question entirely.

- James Dignan