The galleries: Science and art collide

Birgit Rhode's green lichen moth, in Bugged at Lopdell House.

Art is often a matter of intersections. In the riotous exhibition Art & the 60s at the Auckland Art Gallery, art intersects with popular culture.

A more placid exhibition by the German artist Wolfgang Laib at the New Gallery has only a few more days to run and it is special, too. It sits at the intersection of art and ritual and has much to say about the quiet appreciation of simple things.

Painstakingly acquired yellow pollen is carefully sifted into a rectangle that takes on a luminous beauty under intense overhead light. Milk, poured each day by gallery staff into a gentle hollow in a square of marble, makes an immaculate surface.

Little offerings of rice piled against a gabled marble shape that suggests a dwelling reminds us of the daily blessing of food. The absence of the offerings makes a similar stone shape nearby much darker. A series of copper pans, each with a portion of rice and one containing pollen, suggests ritual meals with Hindu overtones and a suggestion of the Last Supper.

Here, the intersection is art and religion. The industry of bees that provides sweetness in life is reflected in a ziggurat structure in beeswax. It is stepped but unclimbable, strong but fragile, a citadel of instinctive wisdom.

Beeswax is also used in a wonderful work where vessels - the artist calls them ships - progress across an elevated structure. It is called Passage and is shown in the catalogue with the space under the structure open.

In the New Gallery the structure, which is slender, weathered timber, has cross bracing on the floor which impedes the sense of passage. Yet the elevated vessels stimulate thoughts of burial, bone chests, of cargoes, of the soul as a canoe and the passage of time.

It is this multiplicity of meanings that, paradoxically, gives force to a gentle, quiet but memorable exhibition. It is the industry of insects that makes beeswax.

Insects are celebrated in an inventively conceived exhibition called Bugged, running until the end of next month at Lopdell House in Titirangi. Here, art intersects with science.

The scientific side is represented by immaculate specimen boxes of butterflies and moths prepared by Grace Hall for Landcare Research. Hovering somewhere over the intersection are some splendid digital photographs by Birgit Rhode. These prints are more than life-size and done with a layered digital technique that gives startling clarity even when the subject in Bee in Your Face is a multiplicity of the faces of native bees. Equally fascinating are the splendid photographs by Geoff Moon showing native birds at the moment they capture their insect prey.

In painting and sculpture work by established artists stands out. Two paintings are by Mary McIntyre of an appealing, wide-eyed girl and her encounters with insects. In one of them the monstrous bug is perched on the top of her head.

We expect children to be frightened of crawling things but here the child is unfazed. Yet with the fertile ambiguity that McIntyre does so well, the insects can also stand for monsters that might later trouble the child's mind.

Jeff Thomson is represented by work in corrugated iron which might seem unsuited to conveying the delicacy of insects. But his big Weta uses the material sculpturally and exploits it to capture its spiky character. Even better is his Puriri Moth, where the iron is delicately cut into a lacework to show the pattern on the wings.

Some of the other work is closer to craft than to art. It is debatable what the shape of a butterfly or ladybird gains if it is made in ceramic. The things become simply ornamental decoration. Art requires more emotional suggestion and more transformation of the material.

The most extraordinary transformations are done by Sylvia Siddell. In Wake Up, a protesting female is surrounded by all the things in life that contribute to stress, and in the midst of them is a large insect.

In Feral Couch a sofa in the jungle with an apocalyptic glow in the background becomes a peculiar insect.

The exhibition is part of a programme that includes workshops for children and night walks with entomologists to identify local specimens if your nerves are equal to it. Nerves are perhaps why Peter Siddell, a sculptor before he was a painter, has his weta, made in 1959, in a cage he made last week.

See one insect and you start to see them everywhere. The exhibition by Denise Kum at the Sue Crockford Gallery until Saturday is powerful but disturbing in its use of outre materials.

A big photograph shows a pattern of bubbles on something that looks as sweet and sticky as the toffee of which she once made an entire exhibition. In this show, apart from a characteristic blue blob, she gets a frisson from a number of models of the convoluted shape of the brain. These models are placed on the top of a rod like a hat stand and are painted pink or blue or gilded.

One edgy piece places two brains on a conventional little round table. On the lower level of the table is a crawling mass of insect larvae. With these maggots art intersects with Gothic horror and intimations of mortality.