Mystery, magic and a maze

By T.J. MCNAMARA

Hyperthreads at the Fisher Gallery, Crystal Chain Gang at the New Gallery.


Darkness helps when you want to create magic. And when you are in command of lighting that can make cords glow in that dark and transform a gallery into an intricate maze, then you are in command of a special magic.

When you can confer on the participant who enters the gallery the power to play variations within the theme created by the cords, then the spell is truly remarkable.

The three elements are combined in Hyperthreads by Maureen Lander and John Fairclough at the Fisher Gallery in Pakuranga.

The main collaborative piece in the large gallery combines Maori string-games, black light and sound effects. The black light makes the colour of the taut cords glow vividly and because the cords are tightly strung there is an intricate triangulation in the maze.

This is intersected by screens on which digitally generated patterns are thrown. These are made up of circles and straight lines. The circles are interrupted only by the outline of hands, which provide a human note in the midst of the geometry and are a guide to keypads where spectators can manipulate images.

Whether playing games with the images adds much is debatable. Despite the cleverness of the technology, it shifts the work towards the realm of video games.

Since the work combines Maori and modern, the intricate maze might have led to more than a game.

There is mystery and magic in the installation but the third M, metaphor, is absent, so there is no sense of symbolism that might have involved the spectator on a deeper level.

In the adjoining gallery are simpler but equally effective display techniques. The emphasis is still on traditional string-games illuminated by black light. The variations of the cat's-cradle patterns are shown against a background of mirrors. It makes a fine, informative and clever display. The show is completed by The Semantic Differential, a computer that converts words into images.

This kind of work is like photography, in that it is matched in the viewer's mind with commercial work and is shaded by the comparison. The power of a graphic computer such as Quantel's Harry, used by many advertising agencies, is just so much more mind-boggling.

At the New Gallery very clever, inventive techniques are also part of a lively show, though for all its glitter it does not match the promise of its title, The Crystal Chain Gang: Prismatic Geometry in Recent Art.

A good deal of the work has little to do with prisms or geometry, but there are lots of bright reflecting or transparent surfaces.

That catch-all word "interesting" is the adjective that springs to mind when contemplating the two most prominent works in the show. One, a piece by Richard Reddaway, crawls all over the walls in the foyer as a forerunner of the way a crystalline virus might take over the world. The other piece, by Gregor Kregar, is a large globe that looks both ways with a blue and a green eye. Glass, mild-steel rods and studs make the construction really interesting.

The next room contains kitschy objects meant to comment ironically on glitter if not on crystals.

There is a rock covered in crochet and a colourful parrot on a branch, done in stitching and beads by Louise Weaver. And there's a vast chandelier part-found and part-made by Regina Walter, who also makes a statement about context in her Fauxberge works. These are cheap objects made precious by being displayed in a velvet-lined box and made art by being shown in a gallery. These are gentle but entertaining paradoxes.

The walloping big installation by Anthony Sumich is far from gentle. These black sculptures mounted on a wall show how a flat surface becomes an object in space. The works are given tension and life by the way the cut plate that folds into the three-dimensional object does not quite match up.

There is also a certain brutality in the big black presence that Stephen Bram creates using a corner of the gallery and working with three-point perspective.

Opposite that, Anne-Marie May shows that interesting abstract works can be created by using rainbow strips of felt as well as oil paint.

On another wall Jim Speer shows that science diagrams can be decorative and interesting on a wall if you make them big enough.

Most interesting of all is, again, Reddaway. His two structures called The Crystal World have systems that cantilever and balance and, in a fractured way, reflect the world while making signals that are like a gesture in space.

It all makes for a show that is ambitiously curated but - given the parameters of its conception - was never going arouse much emotion, let alone passionate involvement.