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Otago Daily Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Art seen: May 22
"The Splendour of Ukiyo-e", various artists Brett McDowell Gallery The rise in appreciation for Japanese Ukiyo-e art since its time of creation is nothing short of remarkable. Originally viewed in much the same way that we today might regard photographs on calendars or mass-produced posters, the rise of interest in asian art in Europe in the final years of the 19th century began a rise in the perceived worth of the art, to the point where it is now seen as a high-point in Japanese creative culture. The low-art origins are a reason why good quality prints are often something of a rarity. Brett McDowell Gallery has made an annual ritual of its exhibitions of Japanese prints, and this year's collection is a fine one, featuring several better-known artists, most notably the Utagawa school's Kunisada. Many of the pieces are single frame images, displaying scenes in the real or imagined daily life of high society — the "floating world" which gives Ukiyo-e art its name. The current display also includes several impressive multiple-panel pieces, perhaps the most remarkable of which is the three-piece Natural Flowers cooling off on the Sumidagawa by Nobukazu, its effectively composed night river scene aglow with rich blues and reds. "Glass Harbour", Russell Moses (Milford Gallery) The rich colours of rippling water are also much to the fore in an exhibition of Russell Moses' impressionistic arrays at Milford Gallery. Moses' art has long concentrated on the play of light on the surfaces of plants and water, creating multiple windows on the world through his grids of small geometric forms. In his latest exhibition, the artist concentrates on the rippling waters of Otago Harbour, as seen from his Port Chalmers home. His work has changed subtly for his previous series, incorporating here highly reflective paint rather than his former pearlescent surfaces. Ripples are deliberately featured in this series, created by ridges in the painted surface and the resultant effect is works in which the light shimmers and shifts as the viewer moves around them. The use of multiple colours within specific works is also a departure, allowing the pieces to suggest both the water and reflections of the land beyond. In a couple of the works, a mirror black surface is used to suggest night waters, also a nod to the art of Moses' late friend Ralph Hotere. The artist's deliberate association of the painted surface with the geometries of music comes to the fore in several pieces where ovals of flat white become visual chords on the surface of the waters. "Kiingi Tuheitia Portraiture Award 2023", various artists (Tūhura Otago Museum) With this year's Kiingi Tuheitia Portraiture Awards drawing towards their conclusion, Tūhura Otago Museum is displaying finalists from the 2023 awards, allowing an opportunity to see the standards and styles the competition engenders. The competition's aim is simple: Emerging Māori artists are encouraged to create works honouring their tūpuna, playing out the line of their whakapapa to their ancestors. Despite the modern media used, this is perhaps the most traditional of Māori art subjects, the honouring of those that went before. The award is a fitting legacy for Te Kiingi. The works are appropriately being displayed in the Tangata Whenua Gallery, where they are interspersed with the permanent displays of Māori history. Pieces range from the purely representational to the more abstract or expressionistic; photorealistic paintings are presented alongside the symbolism of a broom and a three-panel poem. The winning work by Stevei Houkāmau (Ngāto Porou, Te Whanau-a-Apanui) uses a necklace as an inspiration, with each of its stones a memory-trace leading back to the artist's ancestor. Many fine and imaginative pieces are present, with highlights including paintings by Robert Pritchard-Blunt, Marie Kyle and Jody Tupara, the aforementioned poem by Trinity Thompson-Browne, an impressive carved work by Tukiri Tini, and a clever group sports photograph by Bodie Friend. By James Dignan
Otago Daily Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Art seen: April 24
"Precarious Existence", Jane Siddall and Rob Foote (The Artist's Room) "Precarious Existence" is a joint exhibition by two artists whose disparate styles nonetheless mesh together appealingly. Jane Siddall's impressive animal studies are created with two different media — wildly colourful pencil work, and more gentle, muted acrylic. Near-mirror symmetry plays a role in several of her works, notably the fantasy shelter of the two foxes in "Safe Haven". The wildlife of Africa and the Subcontinent is a major subject of the artist's images, with elephants and leopards inhabiting magic realist worlds of fabric and wallpaper patterns. Where Siddall's works are almost wilful in their kaleidoscope of colour, Rob Foote's work largely takes the opposite tack. Foote's pictures are quiet surrealist works of unbalanced structures and realms created in a soft sepia-toned charcoal. Humour is very much to the fore in several of the pieces, most obviously in Pac-Man-Hat-Tan and in the wry reworking of a famous image of 1920s construction workers, Angry Bird's Eye View . The two series of works gain connection through a small series of paintings of brightly coloured insects by Foote in acrylic on wallpaper. The vibrancy of these works and the patterned backgrounds tie in perfectly with Siddall's vivid animal scenes. Yuki Kihara (Milford Gallery) Yuki Kihara's exploration of personal and colonial history extends in "Presence in Absence" with a series of lenticular images indicating the passage from the past to the future. In the works, we see Kihara's Victorian-era alter-ego, Salome, as she passes through a changing world. We sense her navigation through space and time, and become aware of the changes not only in her existence but also in our own, as well as the ephemeral nature of the individual lifetime. The clever use of lenticular photographs, which shift and shimmer between images as the viewer moves around them, allows us to be aware of this motion through the plane of earthly existence. The photography is excellent and the works are beautifully presented. The figures and trees move within the picture frame, growing and developing as time passes. We sense the presence and the absence as morning turns through afternoon to evening in the scenes. The central work in the display, a single panoramic photograph, brings suggestions of the journey of societies through time. Kihara's Pacific Island heritage is hinted at in props such as the 'ava bowl and the Bible, representative of the traditional and colonial influences which have shaped Pacific society. "Fault Lines" (Dunedin Public Art Gallery) There are times when representation cannot express the intangible or the ineffable. It is at times like these the power of abstract art comes to the fore. In "Fault Lines", the Dunedin Public Art Gallery presents work by several top New Zealand abstractionists whose work has not only confounded expectation but has challenged the very nature of the art object and its relationship with the gallery space. From Julian Dashper and Oliver Perkins' questioning of the nature of the framed image, to the soul-deep hurt of Ralph Hotere's lament for the lost land of Port Chalmers' Observation Point, we are presented with works which require thought on the part of the viewer. These are not easy pieces, but they are worthwhile. Perhaps the most accessible work is the gestural sweep of Gretchen Albrecht's Cardinal , its hemisphere divided into two vibrating fields of colour. The artist's message, of the passage of life, death, and rebirthas told from a Christian perspective, may not be readily evident to a casual glance, but the sheer power of the colour makes this a hypnotic piece. While work by Don Driver and Don Peebles may not have the immediacy of Albrecht's colours, their playful use of found objects within their constructions produces work that delights as it confounds. By James Dignan
