KEY POINTS:
Group shows can be a problem for the critic: too many names, too much variation in style and quality. The outstanding exhibition, Political World at Whitespace Gallery in Crummer Rd until March 28, is an exception.
Its unifying element is not politics but the quality of the work. Right in the centre of the exhibition is a remarkable sculpture by Virginia King. She usually works in wood but this piece is in stainless steel which exactly suits the nautilus shell shape and glitters like the sun on the sea. The nautilus' shape is also linked to the fern unfolding, often stylised as the koru, which has taken on special resonance for New Zealanders. In this work, the shell is inscribed with strong, elegant lettering that lists in Maori and English some of the most potent natural things in this country, by land and sea. The result is a singular combination of delicacy and strength. Its size alone makes it imposing. It is a splendid work that should find a public space rather than a private home.
In complete contrast to the hard brilliance of steel is a work by John Ioane where the principal feature is a mask cut in palm frond or Andy Leleisi'uao's works set in corned-beef cans which make satiric use of The Simpsons.
Explicit politics in art seldom work well but an oblique message can sometimes convey a lot. Gay Jurisich hangs a dense forest of red ribbon from the ceiling and makes a work that is impenetrable and obviously contains a mystery. Its simplifications contrast with the explicitness of a big chair by Lauren Lysaght made deliberately uncomfortable by narrow ridges containing slogans and roped off by an arrangement of grenades poised to explode. It should look dangerous but sits too quietly.
One memorable work is a still-life of tyres in transparent resin by Regan Gentry that exalts the commonplace as well as the manufacturing process. Sharpest of all is a series of necklaces by Mary McIntyre, all adorned with tiny circular paintings each with some sort of edgy comment. In a self-portrait on one of these images, her lips are stitched together like the eyes of the envious in Dante's Purgatory. As in Purgatory there is hope for redemption and other links in the chain suggest hope in natural forces.
There are more images of politics and punishment in the show by Martin Poppelwell at the Anna Bibby Gallery in Jervois Rd until March 22. Here it is the politics of art and the expression is witty. The tone is set by a couple of ceramic works that deny all the accepted canons of craft and art. They are graceless shapes with simple white glaze slopped on and lettered in the roughest way as decoration. Irony abounds. One work says, "Bad Artists Always Admire Each Other's Work".
The paintings are equally ironic. A Prophet shows an art construction alongside a shaky tower from which emerges the head of the prophet like a speech balloon filled with an unintelligible maze.
The Penal Colony is a short story by Kafka where a machine inscribes the nature of their crime deep into the flesh of criminals condemned to the colony. In Poppelwell's Study for Penal Colony, a bit of framing timber is the cutting device shaped at its end like a pen. The victim is a blob that may be a person, an idea or a penis. The base on which it rests is a rocky barren place of stones. Fragments scatter everywhere. Similarly Study for a Pad has no place to rest. It is all splashes of colour that drip into the future. The exhibition is called Please Excuse the Mess.
The ideas and feelings of Charlotte Handy are much more subtly expressed. Her paintings at the Milford Galleries are notable for misty changes of tone that create an individual atmosphere for each work, suggesting a landscape in some indeterminate place. Impressed on their soft sensibilities are crosses and grids that may be the remains of particular portentous events. The feeling that something important has happened in this place is more explicitly marked in the several bold black and white works but the emotional key to this impressive body of work lies in the lovely shifts of colour, notably in the diptych Manzara and The Sun Can Set and Rise Again.
The work of Mark Goody at Oedipus Rex that runs until March 29 is, by contrast, almost monochrome though it also talks of the past and memory. The thick textures of the heavy paint describe details of sculpture in Waikumete Cemetery that gives its name to the show. The force of the work lies not in the paintings, no more than competently done, but in the gravestones themselves which transmit a sense of social history and time past.
