The galleries: Art of saying one thing and meaning another

By T.J. McNAMARA

While interested viewers troop to see the approachable and colourful art of Karl Maughan at Gow Langsford in the mid-town gallery area, there are alternative attractions along Karangahape Rd that are much more odd but also more challenging. The challenge is mostly because there is so much of that most disconcerting quality, irony.

Irony is that artistic flourish where you say one thing but imply the opposite. The intriguing show called IKI and thanks for all the IKA last week at Artspace which combined work from Latvia and Polynesia was filled with videos and stuffed with irony.

Irony still rules in Karangahape Rd. Francis Upritchard had one of her barbarous, museumised, grotesque stuffed heads and some macabre stuffed hands in that show at Artspace. It emphasised the irony that what is treasured by museums is often ugly.

She continues this bizarre strain in an exhibition just across the road at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until April 3.

Her work has had great success in London where irony is the "in thing" these days. In Auckland she is showing compelling works that take discarded everyday objects and make them extraordinary. A squash racquet bereft of its strings can, by the addition of ritual heads with an ancient Egyptian flavour, become a fetish object of extraordinary resonance. An old rug, with the help of a stuffed monkey and another racquet, can evoke the whole world of ethnology.

Her work demonstrates the irony that something battered, used up and close to rubbish in one culture is another culture's treasure. There is also the transforming power of art.

In another work she creates an Orrery. Such a thing was first, centuries ago, an elaborate model to explain the movements of the solar system. Then, because of their elegant structure, they became museum pieces and collectors' items. Now Upritchard shows can evoke their whole elaborate mathematical presence with school compasses and blobs of clay. An irony of history.

The exhibition is shared with Rohan Wealleans who uses paint in inventive but contradictory ways. This exhibition shows a remarkable expansion of his range.

A typical work, Ritual Fountain, is made of heavy layers of paint so thick, they can be carved. The outer surface is red and the patterns carved into the surface are Polynesian. In the centre, the thick, solid paint is slashed through in a way which allows liquid paint, dammed up under the surface, to spill out into a bowl attached to the piece.

All this demonstrates the qualities of paint: that it can be hard enough to carve, liquid enough to flow, be contained within itself yet move and harden into a pool. The work does these things and also embodies the ideas of attack and wounding contradictorily allied to the source of new life and movement.

In a twin work coloured blue but also called Ritual Fountain, the surface was cut with a knife during the opening of the exhibition as a ritual gesture; the paint within flowed and was fixed and held in the basin of the fountain.

The show is completed by a number of Wealleans' more familiar works where a multiplicity of layers of bright paint are cut and exposed like a mining operation on a colourful strata of rock. The excavated bits are used to make jewellery.

Some of the smaller works have the surface cut away almost entirely and these link to the artist's new ventures into print making as highly original and intriguing visual objects. The irony is that the apparent crudeness of the image-making conceals the utmost sophistication of technique.

This prevailing atmosphere of irony makes this earnest viewer very suspicious of the ambiguities in the exhibition by Steve Carr at the Michael Lett Gallery until April 3. Ranged along the wall are carefully composed, sharp, very pretty photographs of cherry blossom reminiscent of spring festivals in Japan. On the floor is a sculpture. It is a hay bale that has been cast in fibreglass and painted vivid yellow. It is hard where you expect yielding and artificial where we expect natural. It is startling but certainly not rustic or pretty.

Then there are two DVDs that show the artist having a hay fight with some children and then being tied to a rotary clothes line in a game of cowboys and Indians.

The show is completed by two photographs of elderly men, one bookish and the other something of a gardener. It is hard to tell if these images are affectionate or mocking. Is this some kind of ironic truth? Is the cherry-blossom for real? Is it saying that what is usually considered pretty is just sentimental slop? It would be good to be able to say that these were fertile ambiguities but they really read as confusion of concept and purpose.

The puzzling progress along K Rd ends with a bang or rather a BOOM BOOM. This is the title of an exhibition by Hye Rim Lee at Starkwhite whose doors are concealed by black curtains. Inside are four immense screens and on them are projected the basic bits and pieces of the computer graphics needed to manipulate an Asian female figure in a computer game. There is one screen for each of face, breasts, buttocks and feet. The images change constantly around reference points and construction grids.

The effect is overwhelming but the human parts which should be attractive, even erotic, are totally artificial. They are giant size, monumental, technically brilliant but chilly emotional wreckage. How ironic.