Isn’t It Just by Ed Bats
“Ed Bats” is this anonymous artist’s pseudonym, which originally started out as a graffiti tag. This show at Wellington’s Page Galleries explores how a city, like layers of paint, is imposed on the natural landscape, with Bats’s works often bridging the gaps between painting, sculpture and installation. A rainbow of large oblong, square and circular canvases are stacked flat against the wall like children’s building blocks in Oh Yes You Can. Displayed against a yolk-yellow wall at the front window, No Go Heaphy Road shows a dead-end road from above, revealing small glimpses of colour from under layers of dark green, black and brown paint. This application mimics the whitewashing of graffiti – painted over and over – resetting the battlefield between city officials and street artists. Ironically, graffiti removal specialists are one of the few artistic influences cited by Bats, who takes care to avoid commenting on the work.
Until November 26 at Page Galleries, 42 Victoria Street, Wellington. Free.

Triple Feature by Josh Azzarella
US artist Josh Azzarella makes his Australasian debut. Triple Feature is a Frankenstein’s monster of cinematic reconstruction starring FW Murnau’s vampiric origin story Nosferatu (on its 100th anniversary), Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video (on its 40th anniversary) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The twist? Azzarella has painstakingly removed all signs of human life through a frame-by-frame process of digital collage.

The films play in separate darkened spaces; appropriately for Thriller, you sit on retro movie-theatre seats to watch. While they play, minus their actors, the sounds of the abandoned settings remain; whistling mountain winds, the hum of neon from Thriller’s Palace theatre sign, and the hollow sounds of empty space. Michael Jackson’s hit single has also been removed from the Thriller video, but the iconic scores still soundtrack the other two films, implying that they originate from a non-human source. This artistic censorship turns a backdrop of castles, graveyards, and space stations from familiar to haunted and raises questions around the legacy of pop culture.
Until November 27 at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, Civic Square, Wellington. Free.

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Her Heirlooms in My Garden by Quishile Charan, Cora-Allan Lafaiki Twiss, Debbie Harris, Hollie Ryan, Ashleigh Taupaki and Molly Timmins
Showing at West Auckland’s historic Corban Estate Arts Centre across two rooms and outdoors, this group show features works by both budding and well-established contemporary artists. You’ll see embroidery, textiles, ceramics, beading, metalwork and more, all created around the theme of gardens and how they’re places of both beauty and connection. In this case, the connection is with each artist’s female relatives – mothers, aunties and grandmothers. Hollie Ryan, aka Hark Handmade, makes incredibly detailed flower bouquets from beads, and for this show they’re inspired by arrangements she used to see at her grandmother’s house. Ashleigh Taupaki has fashioned edible native plants from delicate copper plates, including kawakawa and pikopiko, symbolising the cultural knowledge passed down from her nana. In the centre of one gallery, Debbie Harris’s fantastical ceramic flora rises out of a lilac wooden planter box (made by the curator’s father), while others bloom through the floorboards. There’s plenty to see; make sure you don’t miss Cora-Allan Lafaiki Twiss’s garden bench installation on the estate’s front lawn.
Until December 11 at Corban Estate Arts Centre, 2 Mt Lebanon Lane, Auckland. Free.

Charm Offensive by Jasmina Cibic
UK-based Slovenian artist Jasmina Cibic is showing for the first time in Aotearoa at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Using film and installations, she explores power, culture and political agendas. This exhibition features Cibic’s award-winning film The Gift, which follows three men – an artist, a diplomat and an engineer – competing to achieve the perfect symbol of unity in a divided, dystopian nation. The films are shown on three large screens side by side, and they’re incredibly striking, featuring huge, expansive spaces such as swimming pools and gigantic buildings. The real-life filming locations included the French Communist Headquarters in Paris, Geneva’s Palace of Nations and the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. Alongside The Gift, you can see new drawings that Cibic commissioned especially for the Dunedin museum, in an installation called Charm Offensive. It’s a series of botanical illustrations, where illustrators were given the Latin names of species as their sole point of reference to create the drawings. As the plants were frequently named after their European colonial “discoverers”, such as Joseph Banks and James Cook, these works aim to address the "colonial violence imposed by national and political powers both on nature and culture".
Until February 12 at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 30 The Octagon, Dunedin. Free.