The galleries: Weirdness and wit fused with a fine savagery

Julie Firth's photographic works include Holding Cell in which a woman embraces a pig carcass.

Oddity rules this week on a small scale and a grand.

The oddity confers a special kind of intensity. Oddest of all is the exhibition Sweet Bye n Bye by Sam Mitchell at the Anna Bibby Gallery until August 26.

The first oddity is in the big concrete emptiness of the gallery as the exhibition of nearly 30 small works is crammed into one far corner. Another unusual feature is they are painted on the back of panes of glass. Despite their curious imagery they are framed with conventional frames.

In previous exhibitions Mitchell has done little bitchy drawings on bits of old books. The images were shrewdly observed and relentlessly satirical, often reversing fairy tales to accommodate a feminist point of view.

These works on glass have the same feeling, although there are more cats and birds and fewer humans. The best retain that element of fine savagery that gives them their force. Even a straight painting of a cat called Dirty Paw Kitten gives the impression of feral craziness.

The sharpest wit is reserved for the humans. Here, the added element of tattoo designs comes into play. A typical work is called Mee Lady, a face in a circular frame.

The woman has blue hair done in Mitchell's unique, stylised way and the face and shoulders are covered with images representing desires, memories and experiences.

A bird flies downward instead of soaring up as a free spirit. The face is covered with the countenances of middle-aged men. The man of Mee Lady's real dreams is further away on her shoulders. In addition there are hearts and a hint of the dead.

The tattoo images play an ironic part in a work like Bite, notable for a naked Tinkerbell, and in Sssh you'll Wake the ... where a tattoo glorifies "True Lust".

Not all the work is as intensely ironic as this but the best of it develops Mitchell's sharply acid point of view even more effectively than in previous exhibitions.

Also at Anna Bibby is the work of the eccentric Martin Thompson. He works entirely on graph paper, making intricate patterns with tiny touches in mind-boggling detail.

The works are mounted in a plastic sleeve and have curious little abstract cuts made in the edges of the paper.

The patterns look computer generated in their complexity but there is just enough hint of touch to show they are made by hand.

The best of these patterns are the ones in purple. The effect is amazement at the obsessional focus that created the work rather than any of the usual responses to art.

More self-consciously grand and dramatic with intricate levels of meaning is the photographic work of Julie Firth at Artis Gallery until August 27.

The works are all transparencies mounted in light boxes, with, in one case, additional images projected from the back.

They are not historical documentary shots in the way of much New Zealand photography but surrealist staged scenes in the manner of the American Joel Peter Witkin.

This technically impressive show is called Stain and it creates a strange world where a beautiful white-clad woman struggles with her nightmares.

In a typical work called Holding Cell the woman is in a tent with the sands of the desert beyond. Hanging from a meat hook is the butchered carcass of a pig which she embraces. On the floor are keys and a garter, and broken glass.

Within the pig image is a smaller portrayal of the woman, ritual regalia around her neck, contemplating her crotch in a mirror in the way advocated by feminists in the past.

It's all very theatrical and the fleshiness and the mirrors continue throughout the show in dream worlds of light and landscape, stone, snow and harsh tar seal.

It makes for odd, yet powerful images but the meaning is obscure.

With so many dead pigs, there must be a theme linked to Jewishness where pork is forbidden nourishment.

So much red raw meat seems linked to desire - the woman has red fingernails - yet, paradoxically, she is attacked but also made ecstatic by desire. Always there is a sense of alienation and threat.

The best way into this strange, yet curiously memorable show is probably through the simplest of the images called Moving Immobility where the threatened woman is alone on the harsh tarmac of a straight road between hills dusted with snow. In the foreground is a stain of blood.

The work presents a special, disturbing view of the way dreams are a special kind of spiritual reality.

Also in Parnell at the Bath Street Gallery until August 19 is an exhibition by Simon Ogden which is odd because there are two kinds of works on the wall so completely different they might well be the work of two artists.

The colourful acrylic paintings and the collages of patterned linoleum are equally effective as inventive decoration.