• "Shades of Blue and Clear", Galia Amsel (Milford Galleries Dunedin)
So it is with the beautiful organic glass works of Galia Amsel. Her forms, with their moving waves captured in mid-break, evoke the depths of the ocean. The artist has utilised the nature of her material, especially its pre-molten state as individual "billets" of colour, to create unique swirling patterns deep within the solid.
Two of the works stand apart, with their lenticular forms seeming to show a rising spring of fresh water emerging from the blue depths. The scored surfaces of these two pieces create moire patterns which toy with the light passing through them.
There is something immensely tactile about the sculptures - they seem to call to the viewer to reach out and touch them. The artist has shaped individual surfaces in several ways, so that each work contains polished reflective surface, dark matt sides, and masked and sandblasted stipple effects. The combination of these different surface textures adds an extra layer to the simple elegance of curve and the flow of the deep colours.
• "An Alternative History", Ben Cauchi (Brett McDowell Gallery)
The artist is well known for his painstaking use of archaic photographic techniques and technology to produce toned modern Victoriana, recently created works steeped in the musty gloom and mahogany-and-brass redolence of a bygone age.
Process and image are equally important facets of this work.
Cauchi's large glass-plate negatives have been reused with different chemical processes, notably the use of palladium-based chemical emulsion.
This is brushed on to the paper, soaking into the fibres so that the paper itself becomes a key facet in the image rather than simply a base over which a skin of photograph is laid. The chemicals produce warm ebony-toned photographs, well suiting the museum-piece images they depict. Other works presented include a ghostly blue cyanotype, a warm reddish-brown work on printing-out paper, it's negative formed though exposure directly to the rays of the sun, and - very unusually for this artist - a digital print.
One wall of the exhibition is reserved for the cryptically titled "Doppler Effect", its six salt-print panels showing clues to some hidden inner narrative.
• "Seat Assignment", Nina Katchadourian (Dunedin Public Art Gallery)
This form of visual arts theatresports has forced Katchadourian to think on her feet, producing works from raw materials which she either brought on to the plane, or which were provided as part of the in-flight service. Travel guides and airline snacks combine in photographs and slides to create surreal fantasies. Fellow passengers are surreptitiously snapped while they are sleeping. Reflected light on glossy magazine illustrations creates images where light-flare subverts the original images and meanings.
Humour infuses many of the works, but there is also the pervasive anxiety and detachment from real life that accompanies long-haul flights - a literal lack of groundedness in the passenger's rituals and routines.
Most spectacular of the works is a series of humorous portraits paying homage to Flemish old masters, created in the aircraft's lavatory and using towels and paper as props. The artist's imagination runs riot in these works, which include a hilarious video in which paintings come to life as they mime the in-flight entertainment, two songs by AC/DC.
- James Dignan
