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).