Braindrops keep falling on my head

Essential to a good art walk is surprise. I say, give in to the unexpected – to an inner city adventure for the brain, without expectations of consumer satiation.

Such an experience provides ‘‘braindrops’’ – as one exhibition this week is neatly titled – out of the blue come sensorilyjoyous big plops of warm spring rain.

I recommend you step out with a list of 39 Pōneke galleries, care of streetwise artmap. co.nz (really the only complete Pōneke gallery guide, created locally with love). Take to some staircases.

Only a few galleries sell with street frontage. More often, they are out of the way refuges for new ideas.

I was reminded of a city art walk memory: Auckland’s RKS gallery in 1992 with Ralph Hotere audaciously, elegantly filling the gallery with 8 kilometres worth of giant, unwinding curls of fencing wire.

I have been prepared to be taken totally aback at the top of every flight of stairs since.

The drawings of 28 incarcerated men from prisons throughout Aotearoa are currently two floors up at 22 Garrett St in wee project space Envy6011.

Fifty drawings are presented uniformly on A4 paper in a row as a frieze around the walls, emphasising solidarity.

There is no theme, titles, names and little filter on selection, beyond Corrections staff vetting. The work is not for sale (though proceeds going to Victim Support as in previous exhibitions might have been welcomed). The main criteria? Willingness to participate.

This is no big public gallery – though it is of note that last year MOMA PS1 in New York had an exhibition of work by incarcerated artists.

The work on display is modest and fledgling, with its neat hang suggesting promoting artistic worth is not the main purpose. The show would be unusual even if it were by professional artists.

Envy quietly introduces interesting artists to the city. Large windows open the walls out to the light and a giant pōhutukawa, offering a soft salve to this show’s rawness.

Drawings from the Restricted Programmes features prisoners undertaking study through art school the Learning Connexion. Exhibition of work in the city, rather than at their base at Taita is unusual. Should this be so? I do note though the bold and thoughtful huakina at Upper Hutt’s Whirinaki Whare Taonga gallery in 2019, matching prisoners with leading artists and challenging them to create a work out of a small box.

Drawing provides a common open language. The artists can’t visit, so their work on paper meets the world in a way they are not able to. They are granted mana collectively, rather than served up individually for judgment.

It is as if we might, in our minds, add the colour between the pencil lines.

What is most unsurprising for a prison show is at first most apparent: musicians Marley, Morrison and Elvis; a dream sports car; a detailed drawing of an English castle keep; various sketches of experimental graf art and tattoo ideas. Some lean heavy in technique on taught art archetypes: classical realism, or the 1950s modernist doodle.

Yet the effect of the whole is a more openended picture of where these heads are at.

There is the solid-cold hard stare of a figure drawing deep on a rollie cigarette.

Or plant-like crosses on a hill, decorated in barbed wire, with a church in the valley below. There is a softness and honesty to pencil. You feel the contained longing of an artist in their accomplished detailed depiction of a woman hapū with child, hand cradling a bell. Or in a tree, limbs dismembered with new growth sprouting from its trunk.

The space to play and push your art as individuals and as a group, self organised, is the germ of many a great artist-run space. That is the welcome feeling with the excellent Braindrops upstairs at 241 Cuba St. While Envy6011 is hosted by dealer Bartley and Company, this is the former exhibition space for {Suite} gallery (still operating below).

There are plenty of joyous braindrop surprises here. In a colour aura pairing, first-time exhibitor Amy van Luijk shows quiet collages and ink and washed paper. They meet small exquisite, almost holographic titanium coated glass and silver gelatin works by Andrew Beck.

In a pop art comic romp of delightful abandon, Rob Cherry installs 100s of quick, repetitive but rather eloquent drawings of figures consumed with consumer or sexual desire and/or malaise. Here, brutish eloquent physical gestures, and guitars, underpants, sausages and cheap chicken drumsticks are everything. People play pool with bananas. And, with the title ‘‘death of the sculptor’’ attached, a naked long-haired dude is seen out of his coffin and jackhammering the ground.

In another corner, painter Séraphine Pick explores painting in three dimensions with ceramic ornamentation, canvases across the corner, and hanging loose on the floor.

She takes her exquisite soft wild meadow aesthetic to the space, brushstrokes spreading from paintings across the walls.

In the front room, Simon Cuming’s forest floor melange of fungi and plant life in woodcut, ceramics and painting spread beautifully like domestic ware mycelium.

Meeting the colourful visual noise of sunlit Cuba St out the window, Mary-Jane Thomson’s readymade collages of competing signs and slogans on the streets of London are sensitively yet brashly composed visual poems. Souped up in colour, like Basquiat (who features), they celebrate the wild energy of the street, and offer hope in protest against inequality and the cost of living.

A final touch of surprise is Thomson’s curtains on the windows, featuring obsessional patterning in pen of numbers and letters. A doodle gesture that prisoners of all kinds should be encouraged to undertake. At the end of the year that’s been, Braindrops is welcomely liberating.

What, when, where

Drawings from the Restricted Programmes, Envy6011, Friday-Saturday 11am-4pm, until December 17.

Braindrops, Tuesday-Saturday 11am-4pm, until December 21.

Simon Cuming and Mary Jane Thomson will perform 1pm Saturday, December 10.