KEY POINTS:
Two public galleries in Auckland this week have substantial exhibitions. Photographs, videos, sculpture and drawing are in both, but there is not a painting to be seen.
At the Auckland Art Gallery's New Gallery the four finalists for the Walters Prize have work on view. The prize is unique in that a small committee of art experts chooses four artists with a considerable body of work behind them. At the end of October, French curator Catherine David will be the final judge.
The exhibition spreads through the gallery's upper storey and we can decide for ourselves who should get the award (entry is free on Mondays).
The first work is John Reynolds' Cloud, which caused a sensation when it was installed at the Biennale of Sydney and is on loan from Te Papa. The work is made of more than 7000 small, square canvases with silver lettering on white background, that cluster together to make a cloud that spills around the walls.
This is not Aotearoa, a long white cloud. In the mass, on each little canvas, there is an idiomatic expression from the Dictionary of New Zealand English. Few people will attempt to read all of them but to read even some gives a pungent sense of New Zealand English. It's all there: Tight Five, Dally Plonk, Dunny Door, Wop Wops, Bobsy-Di, Open Slather and masses more.
Reynolds has always been interested in signs of one sort and another. This combination of innumerable signs linked so directly to our everyday life reaches to the heart of our complex cultural relationships and expresses it in a visually appropriate, complex way.
ACK, by Peter Robinson, a finalist for the second time, is international in style and scope. It is an aggressive, tense piece of sculpture, which crawls through a couple of rooms just as it did when it was first shown at Artspace.
It has the energy to burst through a wall like a finger through paper. Carved from polystyrene, most of the forms have natural shapes though there are some contrasting geometric girders. Though it is as white as ice with touches of blue, it suggests a monstrous fungus, rather than any Antarctic reference.
Above all it exists in its own right as an extraordinary thing full of visual wit as you walk around it and under it and track it into corners and alcoves.
Lisa Reihana's Digital Marae shows interaction between Maori of the past and present, and their interaction with nature. Most work in this context is polemic but here it is humanistic; the people are the subject. The photographs and videos that comprise it are concerned with beauty, strangeness, myth, oddity and power.
There are strong images here, notably a gaunt Maori matriarch sitting proudly against a tumultuous background of clouds.
Her chair is the epitome of modern design and the vivid patterns of her skirt spread like a peacock's tail lifting high as if on a throne. Her hand, raised in blessing or command, has bright red nail polish.
The same combination of wit and power puts a warrior on a surfboard and clothes a handsome man with full moko in a stylish version of 19th-century clothes and riding boots, and sits him in a plastic seat.
The work of Edith Amituanai is made up of more conventional photographs focusing on Samoan rugby players who play in France.
The group is called Dejeuner because what the players miss in France are their family gatherings for Sunday lunch. Two of the photographs show these mighty men against the background of a French football stadium. Monsieur Philemon Toleafoa stands mighty and sweaty against a background that says Montpellier, one of the foremost French teams.
Other photographs show the homes they left in New Zealand. These are carefully posed but have a documentary feel. Two show a fireplace flanked by splendid vases with lots of family and team photographs around. One picture has the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the hearth. These images are subtly staged to catch the essence of home and away and tellingly evoke the divided world of the players.
Whoever wins, it will not affect the style and reputation of the four artists concerned.
Up at Artspace there is something more recent, more fashionable, and more difficult to take. A sculpture by Robert Hood occupies the centre of the main room with a huge pile of broken and twisted auto glass.
This mass of discarded material is made piquant by outdated registration stickers and notices that say "This Car Must be Taken Off the Road". A clear link to a nearby photograph of a dead-end road is marked by the tyres of accelerating boy racers. A relief sculpture on the wall, made from crushed cigarette packets and beer cans, is also part of the theme that deals with the sad end of some young men who drive fast cars.
It shows how found material can be given potency in an art context. The exhibition also includes some savage short films by Chris Kraus, who is Wellington-born and based in the United States. They too give intensity to scenes of life on the fringe.
Artspace also has an absolute treat in some small, poetic, accomplished works called Trance in Inaction by prominent Irish artist Isabel Nolan. With just a few fine pencil lines she can evoke tall trees on a still day or with coloured pencils make a little design for a carpet curiously touching.
This week at the galleries
What: Walters Prize Exhibition - work by Edith Amituanai, Lisa Reihana, John Reynolds, Peter Robinson
Where and when: Auckland Art Gallery/New Gallery, to Nov 23
TJ says: Substantial work by four established artists - go and decide who should get the prize and see if the judge agrees when she arrives from France in October.
What: Work by Robert Hood, Chris Krause & Isabel Nolan
Where and when: Artspace, 300 Karangahape Rd, to Oct 18
TJ says: Three artists, all edgy and bright: a sculptor using found objects, a wild film-maker and an Irish artist who draws like a dream.
