The galleries: Entering small worlds of wonder

By T.J. McNAMARA

Wonderland is not down a rabbit hole with Alice, but at Artspace until August 7. And Wonderland is wonderful. In a stroke of curatorial brilliance it brings together artists from New Zealand and overseas who use the forms and techniques of model building as a means of artistic expression.

The exhibition has about 20 models in a space all tables and tunnels designed by local artist Jason Lindsay.

It all demands concentrated looking, and there is frequently a special sort of ambiguity in the looking, typically in the work of Japanese artist Rieko Akatsuka. Her models of cities with their tall buildings are made using compound plugs from electronic gear which look like tiny skyscrapers. Her twin cities are connected by a power cord.

The ambiguity comes from the way we marvel at the enormous variety of colour and shape that the electronic componentry possesses, which never obscures its suitability. There is a coded logic in the plugs, but as a city they become illogical yet perfect for their purpose. The whole is a fascinating delight.

The really remarkable thing about this exhibition is that none of the works use conventional sculptural materials, yet there is art of the highest order, the cutting edge.

If there is a theme running through it all, it is a feeling of dismay at the nature of some modern urban development. This is exemplified in the kinetic works, such as an agitated box by New Zealander Nicky Campbell, where a little cube irrationally and irritably totters around a surface.

Some of the items are found or familiar. Rene Luck, from Germany, has assembled a cardboard model of the brain and Australian Ricky Swallow makes a radio that is forever silenced. Still-life indeed.

In the same way, New Zealander George Chang has silenced a typewriter and made of it a green, peopled landscape that evokes both arena and fortification.

You have to be quick or you might miss Peter Robinson's satirical, dough-like man with a cigarette perched on a ledge. It is amusing, but a similar work by Ronnie van Hout, of a tiny soldier perched on an immense rock, is far from funny in the light of current events. His soldier is isolated on his rock and a hard place is not far away.

No avant-garde is complete these days without videos and one here, Placebo by Saskia Olde Wolbers, from the Netherlands, is a marvellous piece of work. There is a quiet meditative commentary which is the thoughts drifting through the mind of a person in a hospital after a car crash that marked the end of a relationship.

The visual element is all pale green and hospital white, and forms move strangely through this sterile environment. There are shapes that suggest DNA and sometimes a glimpse of two beds and an operating table.

Through, around and across these forms a white ectoplasm drips, shape-shifts and hangs. We may recognise that this is paint filmed while dripping through grids, but since the images have been turned on their side, what were drops become soft, horizontally flying projectiles. The effect is unforgettable.

A welcome inclusion in the show is a work by New Zealander Brendon Wilkinson that was first seen last year. It consists of a rocky slope, an architectural model of a modernist house and enough tiny figures to suggest that a brutal, melodramatic incident has taken place.

On the next corner past Artspace at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until August 9 is an exhibition of Wilkinson's more recent works, which in the same way combine the model-maker's extraordinary skills in creating place on a small scale with hints of war, insurrection and violence.

The major work is called The House Across the Road, which is an angular and unwelcoming dwelling on a hill. There is a swimming pool full of sand and, nearby, a dead horse and another being speared and a man surrounded by dogs, being held at bay. It is both strange and deeply menacing.

Here, as in The Gauntlet, which is set in a railway siding, we cannot make a clear narrative out of the work, but once again a dead and headless horse, men with gaping sword wounds and a bleak industrial landscape suggest how violence can rise in familiar territory, and have something of the terror etched in Goya's images of the Peninsular War in Spain.

Something rather less than terror is conveyed by the work of Carla Cescon, an Australian artist whose work is right along Karangahape Rd at the Michael Lett Gallery until August 2.

Her work is more concerned with Gothic horror than real terror. The works are made from black and grey polyurethane and are bats like mice with wings, bearing a human face, all pointy teeth and ears. They sit on the floor as rickety Hellboxes.

It is all entertaining, comic horror, except for one work which is not bats but human hands and jawbones around a chopping block. That is truly scary.

A walk along the sunny side of Karangahape Rd this week is a walk on the wild side where art is concerned.