The galleries: Inventive web to capture dreams

Rohan Wealleans' Red Spirit Snare.

Painting in oils is not dead, but as an expressive medium for art it is coming under a lot of shot and shell. In the many group exhibitions in Auckland this week, few artists are using oil paint.

A typical exhibition is at the Anna Bibby Gallery until March 11. Oil painting is not entirely neglected. One of the most telling images in the show is Emily Wolfe's The Silent Treatment. This is a lovely painting of a bird in a cage done in oil on linen. It perfectly expresses Keats' notion that "heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter".

Another strong oil is Des Helmore's Bather which effectively brings a 19th-century boy from a Seurat painting into the 21st century. In the rest of the show the media are as various as perspex, granite, bronze, ceramic and glass.

A whole section is work in glass, on glass and about glass. There are nearly 30 birds moulded in glass as well as a big cage in Jim Dennison and Leanne Williams' collaborative work, Fly Away Peter, Fly Away Paul, which is almost too sweet.

More astringent is Sam Mitchell's take on Shirley Temple and the birds done on the back of perspex in a way that emphasises detachment and irony.

Sandblasted glass raised in concentric circles in Claudia Borella's geometric abstractions changes form as the viewer moves. That is in complete contrast to the unchanging weight of John Edgar's granite stones penetrated by glass.

Another work that changes almost miraculously as the viewer moves is Winston Roeth's Cedar Diptych, part of a select exhibition of local and international artists at the Jensen Gallery this month. The special quality of this work comes from how the exposed grain of the cedar panel is emphasised by powdered marble in the pigment. Its prismatic quality making colour changes according to the angle of viewing.

There is also a big work in seven panels by Stephen Banbury. Its quality depends on the effect of combining silver leaf with aluminium surfaces.

The leap into odd materials comes at the Ivan Anthony Gallery, until February 25. In the foyer, Brendon Wilkinson confronts us with a real tree branch projecting from the wall. On it a plastic humming-bird pecks a plastic scorpion which simultaneously stings it. It is an odd but piquant staging of Beauty and the Beast as an image of mutual destruction. Then, in the main gallery comes the daddy of them all - a big sculpture called Red Spirit Snare by Rohan Wealleans.

His materials include a big steel ring on a stand adorned with children's rattles and a buoy. These things are highly decorated and caught in a curious web where paint is loaded on to twine or made into big beads strung on wire and connected by flimsy bits of plastic ribbon. The whole remarkable construction is a truly strange trap for dreams.

Also in K Rd, we have light and haze as a medium of expression in the work of Ann Veronica Janssens at Artspace, while further along the road we have the total rejection of conventional oil painting in the work of Simon Denny at the Michael Lett Gallery. This multifarious show also runs until February 25.

It is so crowded that it is difficult not to tread on the artwork. The materials include wholemeal flour and a ladder. One work is wallboard nailed to the ceiling. Others involve wet towels on the floor. Elsewhere there is a pair of trousers with a bucket in them, a basketball, a planter and lengths of string and rope. Most of it is ephemeral junk, the quick ideas of an inventive young mind too impatient to work things to a satisfying conclusion that would repay returning to the work.

The improvised nature of the constructions works against the largest sculpture, Day Through Night , a series of frames linked by sagging threads and a small chain where little abstract incidents take place between the frames. The ramshackle construction defeats the effect of what could be a powerful progression of sensations.

There is much more tension in the cantilevered Clothing, mounted high and precariously on the wall, and more solidity in the witty and cleverly constructed Stop, which features hands and recorders in lively interplay. Big, swinging light bulbs in fabric are also, in their own weird way, impressive.

The sheer gush of ideas shows the artist's potential to be as promising as his fashionable splashing about in unlikely materials.