Human slant to animal artworks

When artists represent animals they often impose human values on them.
The Animal Antics exhibition at the WHMilbank Gallery pushes that to its outer limits - with bunny suits for humans, Egyptian gods in animal form and stylised butterflies for printing on fabric.
Bill Milbank, the former director of Wanganui's Sarjeant Gallery, put the show together from a mixture of stock in his dealer gallery and pieces requested from artists he knows.
The starting point was three cats woven out of electrical wire by a Wanganui male artist whose usual work was quite different.
The cats were his feminine persona, and the name he put to them was Penni Wyse.
The cats got Mr Milbank thinking. He pulled Russell Brown's prints of hammerhead sharks out of his stock, and said they made a point about shark extinctions.
Then he asked Brown for another work and got a print of an angry bird in a backyard.
Artists John Roy and Erna Stachl used rabbits in their work, and Mr Milbank said the rabbit was an ambivalent symbol.
"It looks furry and cuddly but it's pretty feral."
Stachl's human-sized rabbit suits flop on chairs or hang on the wall - "crucified, abandoned, hung up to dry". Their title is Sorry: an exhibition of self-sacrifice and illusionary martyrdom.
Paul Rayner's watercolour horses have their heads turned away, giving them "a degree of unease".
Fiona McGowan's sheep, shorn and unshorn, are as monumental as portraits of heads of state.
Michel Tuffery's moths have added Maori and Pacific Island content, and Catherine Macdonald clearly has an ambivalent attitude to the many dogs in her central Wanganui neighbourhood.
The canines look big and sturdy, and two of them are shown fighting, with the title Over there where man's best friend lives.
Denys Watkin's prints meld animal and human shapes. Gail Edmonds uses the shape of the buzzy bee toy in her cast glass, and bird motifs crop up in Simon Ogden's glued linoleum pictures.
The larger back room at the gallery is full of Philip Trusttum works on an animal theme. They were painted and drawn during the late 1980s and 1990s, when the artist lived on a farmlet near Waimate. Mr Milbank said sales of art weren't good in the existing economic climate, but he was loving his new gallery in Bell St. It was attracting new faces - people with a serious interest in art.
The finishing touch was the new sign outside. It was made and given to him by Marton sculptor Steuart Welch, who sold two large works after a WHMilbank exhibition last October.