Giving magic to ordinary things

By T.J. McNAMARA Art critic

Good artists are shamans; through artistic rituals they confer magic on ordinary objects so they take on a special significance. This week we see an number of artists exercising this priestly power.

At FHE Galleries in Kitchener St the spell is worked simply but powerfully. In Chris Charteris' sculpture half the force comes from his selection of objects. In Anchor Stone he has found a stone of weight and rotundity and bound it with brown cord woven into an elaborate attachment that expresses its function but also shows the importance of the stone, making it an extraordinary artistic object.

The same magic is worked in the simplest possible way in a vast necklace of 96 stones entitled Forces of Land and Ocean and in a very subtle way on the curved rib of a sperm whale by shaping and by delicately carved decoration.

Sperm whale bone is also used in a wall decoration, Hei Matau, a beautifully judged and polished piece, and the shaping of a piece of clouded jade, Pounamu Inanga, shows the virtue of letting the material speak for itself with minimal intervention.

This fine show is complemented by work with feathers woven by Alicia Courtney where the same magic is worked.

There is a much darker magic worked in the very impressive exhibition by Giuseppe Romeo at the Muka Gallery. Here the process of giving magic to ordinary things is taken further into the realm of ritual. Mirrors are used everywhere, not to reflect nature but to offer a reflection on human activity.

Framed mirrors are coated with soot and a ritual message is spelled out in lettering in the soot. Each piece is a spell.

The blackness of soot is repeated in two fascinating and wonderfully made sculptures. Tabernacle for Absolutes is made up of rectangular cases lined with glass that has patterns of silver bands on black. The cases are ingeniously hinged together. When spread out they make a large cross. Folded together in a intricate way around a dark, burned core, they become a tabernacle inscribed with litanies of the Holy Name and the Blessed Virgin.

The other sculpture is larger and consists of a plain altar surrounded with inscriptions in Italian on the duty of a Christian. On the altar are heaped masses of chairs, all painted deepest black.

The artist knows we all live by ritual and slogans, that we have our own ceremonies and leave our own prints. Black hand-prints are everywhere as signs and evidence. He sympathises with how we compartmentalise our lives but through his magic he makes us look at these things in a new way while at the same time making extraordinary things.

Joanna Pegler makes things extraordinary. She has a show at the Anna Bibby Gallery. In her painting the ordinary shapes of land, sea trees and birds take on a mysterious character.

The effect is not ostentatious but extremely subtle. The oddity, and the magic, creep up on you.

A precisely painted piece of scrubland is made mysterious by the way a pheasant heads towards a tunnel in the scrub. The effect is like a Robert Frost poem such as The Way Not Taken. The utterly simple is given significance.

In Pastoral two trees like partners stretch arms abroad and under the arms are two pairs of birds. They face different ways. Simple, but odd and curiously significant. Different species, races, pairs have different points of view.

It is not a figurative explanation that gives these patient, carefully worked paintings their magic, but a very subtle humanising of forms.

It is a very effective magic because this, like most Pegler exhibitions, was an immediate sell-out.

The show shares the gallery with work on paper and on ceramic by Martin Poppelwell.

He tries to work his magic by gestures with paint and by lettering slogans. In this way the work is similar to that of Romeo, but cruder and less calculated.

The title is The Less Said the Better and each piece makes one quick point directly without flourish or frills and the point is usually caustic and sardonic.

To make an anti-taste point, one work, The Cutting Edge of the Mainstream is lined along the skirting of the gallery.

In too many of these works the shout is loud but the magic and the message is lost because neither the image nor the lettering cast any spell on the imagination.