5 days ago
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- Otago Daily Times
Art seen: July 10
"Flux", Euan Macleod
(Eastern Southland Gallery)
"Flux" features en plein air paintings, alongside large-scale studio works, made in response to the landscape experienced on Haupapa Tasman Glacier.
Many of the landscapes are populated with single shadowy figures or multiple figures linked together by climbing ropes. They are climbers traversing rocky mountain landscapes or icy crevasses. Sometimes there are monumental figures in the landscape that are indistinct from the land. Human scale and connectivity are placed within a real representative sense of an observed changing landscape. There is an affective sense of movement and light in these works, that, for the artist, are also about exploring an emotional state.
In the adjacent gallery space is a floor to ceiling wall installation of over 400 small-scale portraits of the artist's friend Geoff Dixon. The project began informally as daily conversations over FaceTime during a Covid lockdown. Dixon had recently lost his partner and the work revolved around one friend supporting another at a time of grief. Here the genre of portrait painting is also inherently reflective of human connectivity.
This exhibition comes to Eastern Southland Gallery from Australia, and is an Orange Regional Gallery and ANU Drill Hall Gallery partnership show. Macleod is represented by King Street Gallery on William in Sydney.
"Shoemaker-Levy 9", Danny McNamara
(Forrester Gallery)
Shoemaker-Levy 9 was a comet that collided with Jupiter in 1994. It was discovered orbiting Jupiter from the Palomar Observatory in California by Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy. Under observation, the comet was seen to be fragmented, having been broken apart by the gravitational effects of its proximity to Jupiter. It was estimated that the comet's fragments would collide with Jupiter's southern hemisphere and this generated a lot of interest across the field of astronomy. It caught the interest of Oamaru-based amateur astronomer and astrophotographer Danny McNamara (1947-2012) and this exhibition, where science meets art, includes a selection of McNamara's photographs of the event.
To contextualise the images on show, there is a photograph of the 12 inch Beverly-Begg reflector telescope, refitted with a Canon AE-135mm SLR, that McNamara used to document the collision events. Over the course of about a week there were an observed 21 separate impacts.
The glossy dark images with jewel-like images of Jupiter are each dated with a timestamp. For example, "Negative #3 20/07/1994, 10.32pm Konica Super XG 400", includes a relevant description of the specific event: "impact site of Fragment N rotating into view". Said to have been more visible than the Great Red Spot, one of the photographs documents the impact marks of the entire sequence of collisions.
"George Burns Memorial Art Exhibition"
(Forrester Gallery)
Once a year, the George Burns Memorial Art Exhibition showcases art by the Waitaki District's young artists. The work on show is from local preschools all the way up to representative work from the region's high schools. A vibrant array of art in a range of media and subject matter fills four gallery spaces of the Forrester Gallery.
George Burns (1903-1970) was born in Oamaru, became a journalist, then a Parliamentary reporter, and was New Zealand's first Fulbright Scholar. Burns was also champion of children's art and in the decades before 1970, in his role as editor for the Christchurch Star-Sun , he established the Christchurch Star-Sun Schools Art Exhibition that toured the South Island. In memory of this work, an annual art exhibition was established in Oamaru and has been running now for 55 years.
The exhibition spaces are packed with colour. Art-making tables are set up in the main gallery with featured interactive elements to the work in other gallery spaces as well.
Much of the work is made collectively and attributed to individual schools while some of the works are individually labelled, like the portfolio work from high school students.
This celebratory and joyful exhibition runs until July 13.
By Joanna Osborne
