The galleries: Trivial ornaments seen in new light

By T.J. McNAMARA

Where you see art matters. If it is at a gallery it must surely be art. Does the context alter what might be a big, colourful poster to a considered work of art?

In Loving Me Loving You, an exhibition of laminated inkjet photographic prints by Ingrid Boberg at the Whitespace Gallery, Newmarket, until May 7, the most trivial of ornamental objects are shifted to a new context to become works of art. Perhaps.

Little ceramic figures of bunnies, Scottie dogs, koalas and kittens, the most kitsch of ornaments, have been taken from the context of Grandma's china cabinet. They are then set, isolated, on backgrounds that displace them from their domestic setting. Blown up large they are in an art gallery. They are, in the word of the artist, "re-sited".

The purpose of this is to make these images indicators of love; to confer power on them. People buy ornamental animals and keep them, dust them, care for them. They grow to love them. Nevertheless, many who make a claim to "taste" find them sentimental, absurd and altogether beyond the pale. Made colourful, large and put in an art context can they become images of people's desire for love?

Is the artist being patronising about popular taste? Is it futile to try to make the trivial monumental?

The answers lie in whether the images achieve a presence that lingers in the mind or whether they simply provoke amusement. This is a knife edge. In this show it is crucial in a series about little china rabbits on a background of daisies. Bunnies Position No.1, where the rabbits are head to head is just acceptable as a metaphor for affection. Bunnies Position No. 2 where they are whispering secrets also just makes it. Positions No. 3 and No. 4 are just big pretty pictures for the kids' room.

Koalas oddly imposed on a photograph of a tree do not work either. The joins are too obvious. Some Scottie dogs on a blue background remain inert. Yet Cats twisting and turning and Flying Fish making an unlikely landing on a blue and white paisley pattern are something special. The context has transformed the trivial into something that approaches art.

Across the road at the Anna Bibby Gallery until May 15 there is a group exhibition of landscapes. A group exhibition with a theme sets up a context where styles can be contrasted and makes life easier for the reviewer. The thematic context can make the exhibition more important than the sum of its parts.

The contrast here is between the highly sophisticated white simplicity of Elizabeth Thomson's Lost Highways with Heather Straka's dark visions.

The Lost Highways are images which suggest where there was once a road through the hills by a swoop of leaves in perspective. The leaves which stand clear of the surface are from trees that marked the way through the woods.

Hanging alongside is a work by Straka which is an image of mountains against a dark background. There is an X on the mountains. The picture is called X Marks the Spot. What event does X mark: an accident, a murder, a discovery, a treasure? It is enigmatic, strange but resonant with suggestion even more so than her two other explicitly political works.

Then you can contrast the way Dick Frizzell skilfully pushes the paint about and makes a corner of road or a black gate the essence of rural New Zealand. By further contrast, Des Helmore, whose work should be seen more often, makes tight compositions of buildings, signs and parking spaces, dry but, nevertheless, meditated into tense evocative images.

These are the opposite of Tim Thatcher who lets rip with little dauby paintings on cardboard that incorporate lurid autobiographical moments with a twist of irony. In the context of this show they are just short of hysterical.

There is also a tight, meditated quality about the work of Eion Stevens at the Warwick Henderson Gallery until May 3. His prolific work always features stylised shapes that create a context in which simple objects can take on remarkable relevance and atmospheric suggestion.

The simplest work in the show is a jug - simple, clean, strong but balanced precariously on a hand. The work is called Party Trick and conveys with remarkable effectiveness how much of life is a balancing act.

Other works are much more elaborate. Trouble at Home shows an aircraft painted as a naive shape. What surrounds this view of the aeroplane in the sky gives the impression of a tensely claustrophobic situation.

As always with Stevens there are imaginative, sharp-edged shapes and inventive use of texture to energise the paint but what the painting conveys is how anyone might hurry back home to sort out some difficult situation.

Every couple of years from his base in the South, Stevens mounts these assaults on the Auckland scene and they are always strange but effective.

The question of context is also relevant to the assured work by Susan Ashmore at the stylish Urban Arthaus in Beach Rd until May 8.

She provides a context for her subtly painted, enduring rocks by making each part of a triptych where two parts of the painting by their colour and handling suggest weather, atmosphere and the natural movement in which the rocks reign immobile. It makes an impressive first exhibition.