KEY POINTS:
Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" goes the rhyme, and in a way a work of art is a bit like a pie. There are many ways of making it and many different ingredients.
A small exhibition at the Anna Miles Gallery until May 20 makes the point. Appropriately, it is called The Pot, and one of the works is literally baked in a pie. Darren Glass is a photographer who previously has rolled film in a can down a hill. Here his work, called Pie Cam, has been made by putting the film in a raspberry pie crust, making a little hole and cooking it for 20 minutes.
The result is circular print with fascinating colours of blue and green, rather like tarnished brass. It looks more like the moon of a remote planet than the product of an oven, but it is impressive. Recipe and diagrams are done in pencil underneath. These are facetious when they might well be mock-formal to better effect.
Three other artists have different recipes, all in the best modern manner. Tanya Willis does intricate patterns and Braille-like codes on large sheets of graph paper. The repetitive patterns are counter-pointed by the wavy contours of island and coastlines.
Her two works are made with infinite patience, unlike the two pieces by Rebekah Burt. One, Pie Painting, is a symmetrical collection of small circles, each divided across the centre with variations in colour from circle to circle. The other is shot full of holes.
The biggest meal is by Kim Meek. It is a digital print and he makes a pasty of the mind. The background is a precise, continually repeated pattern but around it is woven a great jumble of things such as might be in a designer's mind, including natural things like intricate twigs, vines and flowers, and bits of architecture and geometric shapes.
A punchy little Gordon Walters is in one corner and a dragon presides in another. It has all the intricacy of memory and is the main dish in an astringent, piquant, little exhibition.
The meals are bigger and more showy at the Gow Langsford Gallery, which offers a mixed menu of local and overseas artists. Everything here is so highly sauced it glows. The show, which runs until May 26, is called In Fluorescents.
On one wall is a huge digital print by Tim Maguire in five courses called Large Poppies. The subject is commonplace but the technique is audacious. What is probably a small watercolour of poppies where the stems are cleverly painted in a number of colours with some action splashing, has been enlarged, enhanced and printed on a huge scale on wonderful, heavy paper.
Nearby, New Zealander Karl Maughan has an attractive work that shows a slight but significant shift in style. His previous work was about gardens and painting. This shifts the full emphasis on to the painting.
It shows a large plant with purple flowers growing in orange earth with yellow and green foliage behind it in the corners. As always the colour is unnaturally heightened. The interest lies in the surface and the dextrous touch of the painter's hand.
A big work by Sara Hughes shows she, too, has made a shift. Gone are the zigzags of cyberspace. The piece is a huge field of stylised flowers - die-cut, spray-painted paper flowers. Hundreds are arrayed on a transparent sheet of plastic 3m square.
The flowers are on two levels, some directly on the background and some projected forward a few centimetres on transparent brackets. This spectacular work is, paradoxically, simple yet complex.
Another recipe is the work by Reuben Paterson, who uses glitter dust on canvas to make a painting like an intense designer fabric, using variations on the traditional koru and varieties of purple. Its campy flavour is reflected in the title, You're an all night generator wrapped in stockings and a dress. Two of the famous Jeff Koons' inflatable flowers are dessert, offering the ultimate in expensive sweetmeat and no nourishment at all.
Rohan Wealleans at the Ivan Anthony Gallery until May 26 is a collection of extraordinary objects. Although he has already received a number of awards, this is probably his best show yet.
His highly individual way of painting is to use layers of paint, which are then excavated to show coloured strata, with the little excavated pieces also used to good effect.
In this show some of the strata are thicker than before, particularly in forms that project from the surface, but the main change is that in the best work the colour is far less arbitrary and acid and more closely linked to the forms. This gives an element of grace as a substitute for the naked aggression of his earlier work. This is notable in Gold, one of a number of wall reliefs that have much more style than the lumpy sculpture.
A typical work is in the foyer, a hillock called The Colour of Space, which has a green and silver surface pierced by sudden and mysterious cavities.
It is among the large works in the show that completely outdo the smaller, darker, experimental things. It is a week with something for every taste.
