Like Stonehenge on Stewart Island

By TJ McNAMARA

Few artists are purely painters, sculptors or photographers. Typically, a bright young talent such as Mladen Bizumic, who has an exhibition at the Sue Crockford Gallery until September 18, moves easily from one medium to another.

The show is called Aipotu: Love Will Tear Us Apart from the song by Joy Division, and includes a soundtrack played by a string quartet and mixed by the artist.

The starting point for this show was the remains of a Norwegian whaling station in a remote bay in Stewart Island. A major part of the exhibition is a group of excellent colour photographs. These have the sharp, bright clarity of all Bizumic's photographs. The remains of the station look like some antipodean Stonehenge and the ambiguities the artist cultivates are apparent in red shapes half-submerged in the water which may be a rusting boiler or red rock.

The show also includes two works done painstakingly by hand. The Rings of Saturn is an outline of Stewart Island with every bay marked and a good deal of lettering of philosophical ruminations as well as references to rock music. Within the outline there is a delicate pattern of contour lines that is a convincing description of the topography until you see that they are born out of the artist's fascination with the intricacy possible with a mass of fine lines.

Another piece, the finest in the show, is a large drawing in oil pen on paper called The Tree of Knowledge. It is similar to the photographs in its concern with the patterns of light through foliage. It is also the product of painstaking handwork and spreads its patterns to make an impressive archetype of all growth.

The exhibition is completed by two television monitors set cheek by jowl. Both screens show lines making a schematic, ever-moving diagram of the original site. The patterns are hypnotic and it is rightly called Psychic Landscape but its bright, electronic impact cannot challenge the spirit and craft of The Tree of Knowledge.

Up on Karangahape Rd at the Michael Lett Gallery there is another mixed media exhibition, this time by Ava Seymour, until September 18.

Seymour made her reputation with collage. She made a wretched series that put crazy heads on people in front of state houses. This was about a social situation. Lately she has shown a similar collage of odd people assembled on a corner of Karangahape Rd. This was about a place.

There is a corner in this show too, of the Auckland Central Police Station with its foundation of red scoria. This collage is about a time. It is called AK79, after a compilation album of New Zealand rock made in that year.

In front of the wall cavort underworld celebrities of that era, all with absurdly large heads. They show their legs, they show their leather underwear. They climb on each other. They are branded on the bum. Swastikas flourish. They are a freak show, although one group, up the hill, is very sinister.

It is all obvious, and because of the oddities of scale, crude and unconvincing.

Much more effective is a group of extraordinary, bizarre little collages. These are basically bones. The bones are collaged with images of feet and eyes. One, called wittily Dada Dentata, is equipped with teeth and pink lips. These little works are not only inventive but also truly strange.

The same could not be said of five big concrete heads that are mounted on old speakers in the middle of the gallery floor. These ugly shapes are each a characterisation of a member of the rock band the Ramones, but the characterisation is reduced to an indentation for the mouth.

They are uncompromisingly ugly totems, particularly the vile pink head of Nancy. The effect is something less than "Gabba, gabba, hey" which the band used to shout.

In the smaller gallery there are much more potent heads. Each is a strange, bald mask with naturalistic eyes. These are made in silicon by Stephen Birch, an Australian artist. They are portraits of people in the Sydney art world and look as severe and grim as so many Roman portraits. They are mounted high on the wall and look down as an extraordinary pantheon. It makes a powerful show, at once fascinating and imposing.

Further along Karangahape Rd at Starkwhite Gallery there is an exhibition of work which concentrates on one medium only. Over many years, Peter Peryer has produced classic black and white photographs. His show runs until September 18.

Alongside his well-known works like the once controversial dead steer and the leaf-covered boat, he has new work which ventures into a much larger print size and into some colour.

The colour is most notable on a great rusty trailer cradle that waits for its fishing boat on the bleak Wairarapa coast. Black and white is still used strongly in that symbol of the impact of agriculture, the weathered tree stump. Once a cliche in New Zealand painting, it is here caught in its grey mysterious reality.

Peryer never photographs the same thing twice. The potency of his creative gaze continues to develop.