Art seen: May 15

Otago Daily Times

14-05-2025

"Welcome Home"
(Hutch)
Hutch gallery's opening exhibition, "Welcome Home", presents work by seven established contemporary artists from across Aotearoa. The art practices represented are diverse in media and subject matter:
Simon Attwooll's works blur the line between drawing and photography. Using charcoal from a burnt-out house, images of the aftermath of a fire are, in the artist's words, "made from the materials the image represents''.
Justin Spiers' photographs are poetic and adept compositions that draw attention to apparent forgotten objects or vacant interior spaces, and the relationships between random yet familiar found objects.
Referencing a long-standing artistic concern with the feature of the picture frame, Tom Mackie presents three photograms of picture frames, including enigmatic images of reverse side wall attachments.
Thomas Hancock's oil paintings are abstracted still life works that experiment with colour and form in familiar and domestic yet delightfully strange compositional bundles.
Ed Bats' sculptural paintings combine abstraction with multimedia structural approaches to composition building — acrylic on MDF and sapele mahogany, for example.
Denise Porter-Howland's ceramics are small scale narrative assemblies — playful combinations of mischievous cats and their interactions with birds, cakes and tiny cigarettes, for example.
Hand-tufted wool carpet works by Megan Brady (Kāi Tahu, Ngāi Tūāhuriri) are drawn from a large-scale installation work A quiet corner where we can talk (2018), and dynamically displayed on low-lying plinths.
"reception", Yukari Kaihori and Alex Laurie
(Blue Oyster Art Project Space)
Two distinct yet spatially intersecting installations comprise "reception", by Yukari Kaihori and Alex Laurie.
Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is met with a curtain of jewel-like beads at head height, and a ceramic bell suspended at the threshold of a square hole cut right through the floor. There is an immediate dimensional tension created by this exhibition. The viewer is drawn into the exhibition through very direct spatial negotiations with the work.
Kaihori's contribution is made up of tiny and multiple site-specific elements. Suspended in resin are tiny bits of moss or leaves, a butterfly and a shell, for example — materials collected from the area around the Blue Oyster. There are further holes cut into the floor, and a patch of living moss.
Laurie's work is a v-shaped string of lights, comprising plaster and aluminium casing. It casts a striking perspectival vanishing point, running almost the full length of the gallery and overlapping slightly with Kaihori's work. The auto bulbs emit a subtle light and they are uniformly positioned — a horizontal counterpoint to the vertical sequences in Kaihori's work.
At the intersection of this site-specific sculptural intervention, and as noted in the accompanying exhibition text, the artists share a conceptual exploration of transitional spaces, including spiritual or more-than-human worlds.
"Spacetimematterings", Motoko Kikkawa, Eva Ding and David Green with Ro Rushton-Green
(Pond Art Project Space and Gallery)
Pond's opening show presents the work of three Ōtepoti-based artists in a dynamic exhibition that includes video installation, sculpture and painting. The inseparability of space, time and matter is the conceptual premise of the show, and the artists share a biomorphic visual language — of spiral forms or networks, for example.
David Green presents a new iteration of a long-standing project, titled Prayer Wheel for a Money Vault (2021-25). The video work, including satellite imagery, is refracted through slumped glass and netting, generating whorls of light and an immersive experience for the viewer. Text by Bruno Latour slowly scrolls across the screen in poetic phrases, sometimes spiralling in the periphery images on the adjacent walls. Ro Rushton-Green's sound piece on alto, tenor and baritone saxophone is a seamless accompaniment and standalone work.
Motoko Kikkawa's series of watercolours are titled "How to Capture Things We Can't See" (March 2025). Kikkawa understands the affective connection between emotion and colour, and this work presents some fresh approaches in the artist's calligraphic style.
Eva Ding presents a single sculptural work that is installed at ceiling height in one corner of the gallery. Comprised of pipe cleaners in black and red, it is a soft spidery network with tendrils that exit the room and connect across the hallway of the gallery spaces.
By Joanna Osborne