Kiwi art finds its place in the toilet

By JOSIE McNAUGHT

Although artists are invited by the curator to exhibit at Sydney rather than exhibiting as a country (as in the Venice Biennale), a tiny corner of the Sydney Biennale is Aotearoa.

Creative New Zealand has funded the three New Zealand artists, but any indication of where they hail from comes only in Daniel Malone's homage to the humble dunny at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Long Drop to Nationhood.

Malone's space is a long corridor with a cafe at one end and toilets at the other. Recognising that the space is a conduit to all sorts of non-art activities, he has packed up an authentic rural long drop and transported it to Sydney.

There's more going on here, though. Malone has painted a stylised mural of rolling hills along the corridor, inspired by McCahon and the work of Aboriginal painter Albert Namitjira, whose paintings appear in fellow aboriginal artist Tracey Moffat's short film Night Cries. Malone references a particular scene where a white woman is wheeled to an outhouse by her adopted aboriginal child.

Malone has been able to put a positive spin on an awkward site, but the day I visited, two elderly women were blocking the corridor as their wheelchairs were maneuvered into the toilets.

Daniel von Sturmer is being touted as an Australian artist to watch. This isn't surprising: although born in New Zealand, he did a fine arts degree at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and has exhibited mainly in Australia.

He is yet to have a solo show in New Zealand, but his upcoming residency at Dunedin Public Art Gallery will rectify that, along with making the finals of Auckland Art Gallery's Walters Prize.

He gets a beautiful white cube to display his video work The Truth Effect, an optical art piece on a large white table with five video projections. Using sponges, plastic cups, a rubber and other everyday objects, von Sturmer explores our perceptions and expectation of space in a clinical setting.

He transforms another cube space, after dark, with a visual display on the Museum of Sydney's high windows. Both works separate the audience from the art, and while that may be the intention, you have to dig deep to get a reaction, if any, at all.

You must bring your own emotional baggage and personal stories to Michael Harrison's spooky paintings of animals and people. He doesn't offer a raft of references or meanings, preferring the viewer to bring their imagination to the work.

These are not pretty people or objects, but something more sinister and unstable. They seem a bit lost, among the other art at the MCA so it is good he also has a solo show at Darren Knight Gallery in Sydney, where he doesn't have to compete for attention with videos, bandaged cheese and toilets wired for sound.