TJ McNamara: Parallel world born of surreal imagination

Bleeding Heart Liberal by Mark Braunias. Photo / Supplied

The exhibition Snips & Snails & Puppy Dog Tails by Mark Braunias at the Bath Street Gallery is entirely a work of imagination. He consciously creates a world that is raw and individual.

The nursery rhyme about "snips and snails" inspires one small drawing of a purple Cubist puppy. The drawing is accompanied by badly spelled text written on an old mechanical typewriter. It purports to be the report of an agent who slips more or less accidentally from one dimension to another. Several of these little drawings are accompanied by these reports, all centred on a project that he calls"M (b) Theory" about a parallel universe.

The odd reports are part of Braunias' mechanism of creating another world occupied by a variety of creatures born of his surreal imagination. His dreams are visually lively and charged with a great deal of comic energy. Whatever their origin they show a fascinating degree of invention. The creatures that fill his paintings and drawings are like those of a modern Hieronymus Bosch - without hell.

The whole gallery space is filled. Two big works are just inside the doorway. One is made up of sheets of paper, with a curious figure dancing on each sheet to a crazy rhythm of curves. On the other wall hangs a 12-piece assemblage of cutouts whose shapes are angular rather than rhythmic. Typical of this show is an unnamed piece that crawls on the wall just beside the door.

On the main wall is a march of characters. Each one has a quality of its own and the artist's ability to handle paint is fully in evidence here. Some have the heavy, clumping lumpishness of work by Philip Guston. Others have linear, exaggerated features linked to the simplest of comic book characters. The painterly quality extends to the colour that links the figures tonally to their plain backgrounds.

The sheer copiousness of the artist's output extends to two big paintings that bend around corners. One is an open crowd of figures and the other is dense with masses of loose blue line. Both are full of energy run wild.

Then there is a big stack of 20-plus boxes in the middle of the gallery. These are just scrappy cardboard but each has a little drawing or a cutout figure stuck into it. Only one breaks new ground by having a slot so you can look into a dark interior where something odd is happening. Perhaps.

This is a typical Mark Braunias exhibition. The whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. Some of the work, the temple of boxes in the middle of the gallery, looks improvised, even careless. Yet the painted figures with the strange rods in their eyes, their heavy feet, their curling indications of odd arms and legs, are extraordinary creations.

In the past Braunias has found his inspiration in a particular world such as magazines about boxing. This time he plunges us into a world entirely his own.

Josephine Do, whose work at Orexart is titled Climate Change, is not polemic or preachy yet it deals not only with climate but also, more obliquely, with change in politics and history. Her ideas of change refer to recent Chinese history although her paintings are full of climatic conditions.

In traditional Chinese art the wind surging through leaves of bamboo can convey many emotions from anger to gentle tenderness. Do does not use bamboo but she uses other traditional motifs of trees and mountains. Through most of her paintings a surging wind is a metaphor for change. The steep mountains and the patterns of trees bare in winter are done in monochrome with the branches of the trees in black.

Juxtaposed with these motifs are the bright colours, particularly, of course, high key red, and figures of smiling infants that were the mainstay of Chinese propagandist painting last century.

These smiling figures sitting on lotus blossom suggest the utopian aims of a China that is now past. Some are fixed in panels alongside the gale-swept landscapes. Within the landscapes similar coloured figures are confined within curved shapes where they are distorted but not destroyed by the natural forces at work. As well as the wind, mists rise among the mountains and obscure the valleys. These work as metaphors for environmental dangers, the theme which is allied to historical change.

Titles such as Ozone Depletion or Sea Levels Change reinforce this aspect of the work.

These are lively, thoughtful paintings but the technique is a little heavy-handed. They give food for thought and have an immediate impact but their message touches the mind, not the heart.

The same might be said for an exhibition at the recently opened Hopkinson Cundy gallery. The galleries in and near Karangahape Rd have a reputation for being extreme. This show by Kate Newby certainly plays its part.

You enter through a loading dock and, if you are quick, will notice one of the works tucked in a corner: a polished black river stone which the artist and a helper, Melanie Kueng, made shiny with egg yolk.

The gallery is divided by another work, a linen curtain with light on one side and no light on the other. A third piece is a hole cut in the wall which allows you to look in a narrow crawl space which contains two lights, a rolled-up painting and a pair of shoes. The shoes, dark brown Daydreamer sandals, are a separate work. Their title is Half a load of dishes, time on the sofa, collection and tidy up of Gambia Castle sign that fell and smashed one storey onto K Road during the storm on Wednesday 11 May, 2011. The shoes were worn by the artist and represent her ordinary activities on that day.

In the gallery office a three-part work uses a wooden door as a table. On the table, which is called Messy Street, lies a group of rocks made of ceramic and a collection of "sound sticks" which are intriguing in their way since they all make different noises when tapped or rubbed against one another. One of them petrifies the impress of the grip of the artist's hands.

A show about the ordinariness of ordinary objects carries a danger of being ordinary.

At the galleries

What: Snips & Snails & Puppy Dog Tails by Mark Braunias

Where and when: Bath St Gallery, 43 Bath St, to June 18

TJ says: A hugely copious show as the artist creates a surreal alternative world peopled by creatures from his fertile imagination.

What: Climate Change by Josephine Do

Where and when: Orexart, Upper Khartoum Pl, to June 11

TJ says: Vivid panels from the propaganda of the past mix with traditional motifs swept by symbolic winds of change, making oblique comment on modern China.

What: I'll Follow You Down the Road by Kate Newby

Where and when: Hopkinson Cundy Gallery, 1/1 Cross St, to June 18

TJ says: An exhibition of pieces so ordinary makes art that may help you look at ordinary things in a new way.

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