KEY POINTS:
By the gallery entrance at Te Tuhi in Pakuranga is a flimsy pile of red plastic supermarket bags, torn and taped together. It doesn't look much in the harsh light while it's being set up, but as its internal fans come on and the light dims, it gently sways and pulses to look something like a cloudscape or mountainscape.
The work, by Christchurch artist Joanna Langford, is a reminder that much art needs an act of imagination by the viewer to be completed.
That imaginative landscape may be fed by memory or nostalgia, or it may be fed by the collective myths and legends of our cultures, remembered and passed on because they tap into some essential archetypes.
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, curated as Te Tuhi's Auckland Festival AK07 project by Emma Bugden and Pita Turei, brings together a range of artists working with mythology and fairytales.
Turei calls myths "my-theologies".
"What are now called myths are the cultural narratives that existed before the prophets like Moses tried to deny other theologies before their own and relegate them to mythology," Turei says. "As Maori we represent a surviving earth culture. The key to survival is learning how to harvest, to read the changes in time and seasons and take advantage as hunters, fishers, harvesters, gardeners. So those theological icons evolved as a result of observation of natural phenomena."
Many children would have learned the Maui creation stories from books illustrated by Peter Gossage, which are blown up as billboards outside the gallery. His daughter Star Gossage has a painting illustrating the legend of the first woman created by Tane.
There is a series of small works by John Walsh from Aitanga Hauiti redefining or reconceptualising myths.
Bugden has another take on the show: "I'm interested in work that taps into the subconscious, into a mythological way of experiencing the world. While I was writing the catalogue essay, I was re-reading Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, where he is railing against the reign of logic."
Australian Polixeni Papapetrou has used the proto-surrealist Alice in Wonderland as the source for her large photographs, posing her daughter Olympia in front of trompe l'oeil backdrops painted by husband Robert Nelson to recreate the classic John Tenniel illustrations.
Gabriela Fridriksdottir has brought two of the four video pieces shown as Iceland's contribution to the last Venice Biennale. Collaborators include her cousin, the singer Bjork Gudmundsdottir, upholstered in a huge pile of sacks, giving birth to a demon coated in white stickiness.
Fridriksdottir says the Icelandic sagas, along with the country's dramatic climate and landscapes, have a profound influence on its artists.
"To be alive is to be inspired. Nature is very strong," she says.
I put it to her some of the effects show a nod to horror films.
"For me they are not horror. When I think of inside my body, I am not feeling horrid about it. It is a certain type of beauty.
"The eruption of a volcano is not ugly. It is beautiful - the textures are really interesting, more than the surface of conventional beauty, which is polished and clean. So dirt for me is really beautiful," Fridriksdottir says.
Another installation by Australian David Haines has two screens projecting a forest scene, which stays static apart from occasional flashes of white light from the edges. All the action is in the soundtrack, a range of sounds offscreen which make the viewers create their own narratives.
"That's a possibility when you are working in moving image in this kind of environment, as opposed to a cinema screen, because you are thinking about it in a sculptural sense or a sense it's in the back of the mind. That's what video art opens up," Haines says. "Also in that piece the imaginary work happens at the level of sound rather than image, so it's very much a piece designed to put you back in your head and your body."
Another video, by Auckland-based Shigeyuki Kihara, has a soundtrack of a Samoan group dance, but the dance we see is a series of movements by the artist in a black Victorian-style dress against a white wall.
Other artists include Cao Fei, Veli Grano, Teresa Peters and Sriwhana Spong, whose door curtain made of cigarettes harks back to the Balinese practice of using tobacco for votive offerings to the spirits.
Exhibition
What: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf
Where and when: Te Tuhi, 13 Reeves Rd, Pakuranga, to April 29
