KEY POINTS:
The emphasis on being original pushes contemporary art into some strange areas. In the mass of art around Auckland this week, there are many odd things. One is art on billboards. Billy Apple has established the artist as brand. His apple logo with Billy across it has been placed in all sorts of situations to proclaim, "This is Art!" Elegantly designed white billboards around town are carrying proclamations with Apple's apple at one end and an object that refers to Marcus Lush and his radio programmes, documentaries and collections - things like the NZR mug that featured in his series on railways. These combinations of advertising, conceptual art and brand names are big, bold and curious.
It was Alice in Wonderland who said "curiouser and curiouser" and this is exactly what happens at Roger Williams Gallery where the lower floor is occupied until October 11 by a big installation by Judy Darragh. The show is called The Joy of Stacks with everyday objects chimney stacked up: glass dishes, bottles, vases, ceramics, salt pigs and a mass of domestic bric-a-brac.
The stacks make tall shapes like minarets. The glue that holds each tower spills lavishly down the objects. The background in one corner of the gallery is a black cloud made up of vinyl records. All this found material does Darragh's established alchemy of turning everyday dross into a curious art that is almost convincing when seen en masse but as individual pieces the sheer ordinariness of the objects kills the magic.
Upstairs at Roger Williams, we have three more artists whose work comes straight from the curio shop. The work of Liyen Chong is a complement to her amazing show at the Gus Fisher Gallery last month where she took all the objects used in a day, from a passport to breakfast food, credit cards to all kinds of packaging exactly imitated in their outward appearance. But she subtly altered their labelling to give the potent feeling of someone caught between two cultures.
In this show, the autobiographical element is continued because these tiny works look like drawings but are embroidered on cotton with the artist's own hair. They show bones and there is an element of mockery alongside the exquisite precision of their outline. Foot-bones have titles like You Jig, You Amble, words taken straight from Hamlet where the Prince mocks Ophelia about the tricks of women which as Hamlet also knew, end in the grave reality of a bony skull. And this remarkable little show is completed by two skulls.
On the same floor is recycled taxidermy by Angela Singer - birds and bats and odd bits of animal, with a special twist that give them the strangeness of a dream. The curious spin is the use of polyester clay as a veil or cloak so Tinky, Twitchy, Tipsy, Flopsy, all birds, are found wrapped in this blanket with only feet or heads emerging. Even their provocative oddity is eclipsed by the sparrow called Squeak who whispers in the ear of a goat.
The Chinese scrolls by Sarah Smuts-Kennedy seem conventional by comparison though their dark trees drip into spikes beyond the paper and hint of danger.
But what of a show called Unsafe made up entirely of glass road safety spheres that actually is dangerous so you have to watch where you walk, and even has danger signs?
If you tread on the tiny glass balls as they are laid out on the floor of Two Rooms Gallery until mid-October you will go for a terrible skate. So the viewer must tread warily around the edges of this installation by Ruth Watson. You can make what metaphor you like out of that.
What is laid out on the floor are maps of the world in odd projections that emphasise the south rather than the north and the sea rather than the land. The curious projections are continued upstairs where the topography is glued on paper and accompanied by delicate drawings. It is certainly a new way of seeing the world.
A leap across town takes us to Artis Gallery in Parnell where Siavash Momeny until October 14 has wrapped all sorts of things in newspaper.
The oddity here is that these are paintings of newspaper and there are obscure connections between the headlines and the wrapped objects. That is what gives the work an interest beyond a virtuoso display of technique so Wave of Hope which is the title of a wrapped bicycle may be a Christmas present and has a future.
A photographer with an eye for oddity is back in town. Often exhibitions of photography have a theme but Wayne Youle at the Tim Melville Gallery until October 20 calls his show Shoot and Point.
Mostly what he has shot are curiosities: the appealing innocent head of a boy looking upward with amputated arms that show he is a display dummy. The oddity of a gas station lettered with an evangelical message. The oddity of old advertisements that offer stuffed crocodiles or buses for US$200 and aeroplanes for not much more are caught in a shot that is labelled Surplus Shit.
One could talk about the technique but it is the eye that sees the art in the everyday that conveys the curious oddity of everyday things.
