"John Patrick McKenzie is Culture Humbug Sexy", Brett McDowell Gallery
The images of Californian outsider artist John Patrick McKenzie are similarly constructed from undulating lines of handwritten text.
The content of his statements seems at once mundane but, through its obsessive repetition, takes on the rhythm of an insistent chant.
This extract from Jesus Christ Likes Most Filipino Women is typical: "most Filipino women like women actresses; most Filipino women like women singers; Jesus Christ likes Filipino women in the Philippines; most Filipino women are not giants; most Filipino women are not midgets".
McKenzie's words and statements are often run together and the empty, enclosed spaces within his letters obsessively filled in.
While this impairs the legibility of his text, it also introduces a compelling tension between the letters as abstract linear forms and the words as bearers of meaning.
On occasions, the artist refers back to himself, producing works that encompass both self-portraiture and autobiography.
Mortality is another recurring theme, with In Heaven listing the names of dead actors and musicians on top of a cloudscape.
Claire Mahoney, "Slap Happy Stick", Rice and Beans Gallery
The gallery space is divided by three blinds with various objects hanging in front of them. One grouping consists of three trays, one of which is made from sticks lashed together like a raft.
In another, the suspended forms have been wrapped in pinky-beige-coloured jerseys, creating a sense of protection and enclosure.
Hanging in front of the final blind is a hand-painted colour chart, showing various shades of pale pink.
The installation is completed by a group of three vases on the windowsill, painted in the same predominant pink-beige hue.
Perhaps the materials are intended to reference the necessities of life: food (the trays), water (the vases), clothing (the jerseys) and shelter (the blinds).
However, despite the ritualistic nature of the presentation, this is no romantic celebration of a primitive culture's simplicity and closeness to nature. Any suggestion of this is thoroughly deflated by the colour chart, with shades labelled mining, dump and indoor/outdoor flow.
Perhaps Mahoney is exploring the modern consumerist lifestyle as a departure from the pure necessities of life and the environmental destruction that is wrought as a consequence.
Rachel Taylor, "Black Holes Versus Baby Universes", A Gallery
Located in A Gallery's front window, this candy-coloured mixed media construction recalls the extravagant whimsy of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi.
Closer inspection reveals that this mixture of castle and cathedral has been created from coloured cotton buds and drinking straws, built around an undisguised armature of cardboard toilet rolls. This intricate celebration of childlike fantasy is also strangely unsettling.
Its writhing forms seem as vulnerable as a house of cards.
This same combination of beauty, playfulness, decorative pattern, vulnerability and anxiety also characterises Taylor's mixed media works on paper.
These densely layered images, mixing drawing, painting and collage, both seduce and disturb. This is especially true of those works featuring children. In The Good Book, a series of blindfolded young girls are shown kneeling, praying and clutching books.
What could be a perfectly innocent childhood game appears distinctly sinister, with the girls surrounded by a cluster of staring eyes, while a serpent slithers among the flowers.
Other works feature bats, ghost and owls, the haunted house imagery of childhood fears, youthful figures engaging in sexual acts, giant insects and strangely psychedelic plant life.
- Ralph Body
![Rozana Lee, "Drawn to see(a)" [Installation view]. Photo: Beth Garey](https://www.odt.co.nz/sites/default/files/styles/odt_landscape_small_related_stories/public/story/2024/10/blue_oyster_r_lee.jpg?itok=IGhlKMSl)
