KEY POINTS:
Folklore once had it that Karangahape Rd became seedier and stranger the further you travelled west. In recent years, art galleries have lent gentrification to parts of the western end. These galleries are sophisticated, but the strangeness of their exhibitions can still turn the west end of K Rd into "Oddity Avenue".
Starkwhite is furthest west. Downstairs until the end of the month, the gallery has an exhibition of three big sculptures by Derrick Cherrie, associate professor and head of Elam, the School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland.
His reputation is based on sculpture masquerading as furniture and absolutely denies any straightforward reading. One piece called Royal Wagon is a series of blue troughs with a folding table tagging along to one of them. Two of the carefully constructed troughs have pillars of pristine golf balls that obscurely suggest fountains, with commercial ceramic vases arranged around the piece.
It is easy to make more of a second piece called Array that is like an extended dressing table with turned legs keeping you distanced from a mirror at one end. The mirror is acrylic and distorting. Perhaps the extended table with its domestic overtones keeps us away from the distorting mirror of reality.
It is even easier to cull some references out of the third work, called Guest House, which is a deep trough with a pipe leading into it. The trough is decorated with bits of glass so it is in some measure attractive but, mostly, it suggests a pickling tub as much as a baptismal font. It would be ideal for keeping a body on dry ice.
The literature that accompanies the show suggests these works are deliberately on the edge of making sense. The sculptor obviously finds it pleasing to join timber neatly and use turned wood and piping. These are part of his description of the ordinary, but the way he puts them together makes them the objects of a dream.
Any meaning the viewer finds sits somewhere between the dream and the reality, but the sculptures lack the denseness and intensity to really spark the imagination. The result is not a vision but an oddity.
As always at Starkwhite, it is worth going up their beautiful staircase, leftover from the days when it was the Pink Pussycat, to see the smaller exhibitions. These are also curious, particularly the work of a young artist called Sarah Graham Read. The title of the show is decoration.jpg. Most of the paintings are abstractions with a spin that suggests her work is about the process of painting.
Read references every kind of painting - from the authentic oils churned out by artists working in China where, in one of the world's largest painting reproduction centres, two modern factories make production-line pictures from landscapes to meaty painterly modern abstractions - and the plethora of styles between.
That the show is about oil painting in all its forms is emphasised by the way the exhibition includes a ladder, a pot of paint, a paintbrush, a drip sheet and a wall painted yellow by a performance artist.
The curious thing is that out of all this emerges one painting, Peter Wabbit, which has a striking individuality and gives life to the whole show. It features a large stylised rabbit, rather like the ones that spring from the streets of New York in that extravagant ad for colour television sets. It has colour patterns that appear to be stamped from the lids of paint pots and areas of thickly worked paint that distantly echo Van Gogh.
The whole makes a lively, colourful and cleverly-made painting that has an autonomous existence; clear of all the blather about process, China and accidental effects.
Further east at the Michael Lett Gallery is an exhibition by Los Angeles-based Chris Lipomi, which runs until April 5, called Maa-nupi Waikipi. As an introduction, in the outer gallery are three banners that advertise other shows in Auckland. The banners are made on rugs with the lettering cut from tapa cloth. The result is decorative but difficult to decipher.
The real exhibition in the main room is extraordinary. There are dozens of little dolls all laid out on tables which have their legs ingeniously bound together. The dolls are not toys but much closer to fetish objects.
At times, they resemble ritual harvest straw dolls or sacrificial objects. They are made with intricate bindings and some have painted faces while others have animal masks of extraordinary power. The range is amazing and each one has its counterpart on the wall as a black and white photograph with a steel ruler to indicate dimensions. This emphasises the museum-like quality of the exhibition, along with the inventive imagination that produced these objects, linking them to dark anthropological contexts.
It is a fascinating and striking exhibition such as one might encounter in a curiously odd corner of some museum devoted to ethnology.
Further east at Ivan Anthony, in a show extended for two more weeks, is an exhibition by Andrew McLeod. There is one of his well-known computer prints crowded with people and lettering, but the show is dominated by three big paintings - one of which, Kowhaiwhai Painting, is highly original in its composition as it plants objects in a row along the bottom edge against a huge mass of patterning. The other two paintings show trees peopled with figures, beasts and birds.
The best is Presence, with its goat, raven and King Kong gorilla. The exhibition is completed by some extremely odd, small geometric abstractions which, ironically and piquantly, are put in wide elaborate gold frames.
Coincidentally, because this is K Rd, there is a framer at the west end whose closing down sale offers huge examples of such frames at half price.
