Sometimes it is the art, sometimes the titles and then again at other times it’s the name of the show itself that grabs the headlines. In Chelsea Pascoe’s case, showing at the Casbah in Hamilton, it’s definitely the latter. Called Hard Candy, the nomenclature couldn’t come with more sexual innuendo if it tried. And just in case you might have missed the references, on the handout sheet, reverse side, there is a handy etymological breakdown of all the various allusions gathered together in this one voluptuous and innocently carnal phrase. The unpacking of Hard Candy begins first with the harmless literal thing in itself – a boiled sugar sweet (of which there were colourful samples to imbibe at the opening) to the more esoteric – an under-aged attractive gullible girl, to the final piece de resistance where all is laid bare – an erect penis, because, and I quote, “bitches like to suck on it as if it were candy.” Gulp! That the art itself, made up of tissue paper might cause further scatological comment …

Puis-je utiliser voter toilette  I once read that we spend a year and a half of our lives on the toilet. The figure seemed remarkable, so I tried to unpick the equation. Average time spent in toilets 20 minutes (approximate daily toilet usage), x 365 days (in a year), x 81 years (average life span in New Zealand) = 591,300 minutes or 9,855 hours or 411 days or 1.2 years Obviously, toilets are important. _______________________________ Puis-je utiliser voter toilette – French for “may I use your bathroom?” – is a presentation of lavatory-based artworks on Auckland’s Karangahape Road. This move to the loos isn’t without precedence. Since the early 20th century, artists have been fascinated with feces, toilets, and bathroom architecture. There’s Marcel Duchamp’s epoch-defining urinal The Fountain, Yoko Ono’s fluxus orchestra Flushing Toilets, and closer to home Huntawaser’s Kawakawa lavatory. It seems that Puis-je utiliser voter toilette is just the latest incarnation of a potty-orientated art steeped in pedigree. At the opening, a crowd of a hundred or so gathered. Each of us were …

At last some sculpture! We don’t see enough of it these days. What we do see is a lot of conceptual work but little honest to goodness solid 3D stuff. So it was nice to see the sculptural pieces of Korean artist, Sena Park, at the Casbah in Hamilton recently. Her mixed media creations are predominantly made of wood and concrete with other items either attached or embedded into the cement: bits of stick, rope, fabric and or plaster, and sometimes covered with a touch of paint. Some of the forms, those predominantly made of concrete, have a geometric look which remind one of origami outlines. Small cubist constructions roughly configured, they possessed a strong industrial aspect almost as if they are simply altered ready-mades where the initial forms could have been picked up from some demolition site. I did like the unorthodox combination of materials. It reminded me of the way singular buildings today are clad in a heterogeneous substances – wood, concrete, corrugated iron etc. The sculptures themselves did possess a certain architectural …