Detail from 'We Are Family' by Patricia PiccaniniWe will admit it was the men­tion of a freely down­load­able pod­cast com­men­tary in this week’s Lis­ten­er that drew us in. Some of us Welling­ton­istas are more geeky than oth­ers.

But giv­en what seems to be the theme of the City Gallery’s lat­est exhi­bi­tion, Aus­tralian artist Patri­cia Pic­cani­ni’s In Anoth­er Life (19 Feb­ru­ary to 11 June 2006, free entry), this use of tech­nol­o­gy for draw­ing the pun­ters in now feels a lit­tle iron­ic to us.

As card- iPod-car­ry­ing technophiles not exact­ly ori­en­tat­ed to the world of con­cep­tu­al art, we would not have thought to attend had we not first seen the pod­cast adver­tise­ment. Yet our per­haps naïve and some­times heed­less per­son­al belief in the use of tech­nol­o­gy for solv­ing all prob­lems makes us the per­fect audi­ence for Pic­canini’s work.

For the high­lights of the exhi­bi­tion are a series of sculp­tures, hyper­re­al chimæric depic­tions of what could hap­pen if we, as the artist says in her com­men­tary, “do the wrong things for the right rea­sons” with tech­nolo­gies such as GE and nan­otech. Ini­tial­ly the sculp­tures may come across as grotesque and dis­turb­ing, but over time the view­er may come to see the under­ly­ing beau­ty, and even human­i­ty, on show. These may be flawed cre­ations, per­haps the artist is say­ing, but they are also a reflec­tion of us.

In par­tic­u­lar, We Are Fam­i­ly push­es all the max­i­mum dis­com­fort but­tons, with what appears to be a human-pig hybrid suck­ling a lit­ter of hybrid babies. Yet on clos­er inpec­tion we see that this is a moth­er whose con­cern for her chil­dren is clear. And, to twist the knife fur­ther, in her com­men­tary the artist points out the prob­a­ble real-world use for such a hybrid: organ trans­plants. Does the moth­er realise the fate of her babies?

But enough of our attempt at seri­ous art com­men­tary in an arti­fi­cial­ly cool and monot­o­n­ic voice! It’s quite hard to sus­tain. So go vis­it In Anoth­er Life at the City Gallery, and while you are there, check out Michael Smither — the Won­der Years (19 Feb­ru­ary to 5 June 2006, free entry) for a ret­ro­spec­tive of one of our most impor­tant and best-loved painters (although in our case this must be saved for our next spare lunch hour).