In Layers, Milford Galleries Dunedin announces representation of Martin Basher who has spent much of his career in New York and is now primarily based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Breaking barriers between genres, context and themes, Basher’s hard-edged and haunting bird of paradise floral works hover between floral still life and hybridised abstraction as he explores the paradox of figuration, the illusion of reality, seductive desire, flatness and spatial distance. Filled with environmental dialogues and bold contrasts, his botanical silhouettes interrupted by geometric shapes contain ever-present sensations of the maker’s presence. Pictorially challenging, ironically romantic, Basher seductively confronts the still-life tradition in an intuitive, graphic, elegant and sparse manner.

The spiritual infinity of the void and optics of darkness, shifting meaning and mutability of interpretation, the plurality of symbols, the discourses of socio-political power across time and culture reverberate back and forth in Robert Jahnke’s lightboxes. Using the three distinguishing colours of the three stages of creation (Te Kore, Te Pō and Te Ao Mārama) and symbols from Te Kooti’s flag, Jahnke harnesses place, event and time. Now and then. Here and before. Deceptively simplified and apparently graphic, layer upon layer is activated and revealed by questions posed: by the artist of the viewer, and in turn by the viewer of Jahnke’s chromatic symbolism.

Graham Fletcher’s paintings deliberately juxtapose relationships. Animated by absence and presence—while fragmenting and compartmentalising time—rooms and environments become objects of veneration where contradiction and contrast commence narrative avenues. Where architecture is revealed as a motif. Who is looking at whom? What is valued? Collected? Revealed? What do we then come to know of the absent inhabitants? Their lives and values?

Shadow, coruscating light, mutating colours, the illusion of weightlessness and suggestive volume, central to Neil Dawson’s unique sculptural vocabulary, results in familiar elements being distilled to essential form. His commanding and beautiful feathers defy gravity while—suggestively—presenting the anatomy of flight. Delivered with remarkable colour shifts, scale exaggeration, and profound sensations, we witness the miracle of natural engineering that is the feather, marvel at nature’s beauty and Dawson’s commanding virtuosity.

Eschewing—and subverting—the formal concerns of traditional ceramicists, Mark Mitchell’s works play with visual perception. The resulting trompe l’œil effect, where patterns shift and shatter, establishes glorious irregularity. Utilising linear surface patterns as well as the harmonics of restrained, repeated, colour, Mitchell adds optical illusion and allusion, building dynamic tensions while complicating what we see and how we see it. Such contradictions, sculptural conversations and forms, and painterly dynamics are uniquely and masterfully delivered.