The best news from Christchurch is that the High Street Project has re-appeared in its third incarnation and location, on the second floor of 130 Hereford Street. In the same week of April as the first show there, Jonathan Smart marked another significant survival landmark, ten years in business, with Gregor, a disappointingly quiet, seen-most-of-it-before group show. Earlier in the year Grant Bambury opened for business as the newest central city dealer, with a bang provided by generous quantities of wine and roses. The predominance of conservative, best-of-the-CSA painting so far, though, has been less attention grabbing.

The art I'd choose to mention before its appearance slips too far back came up in venues a little outside the usual Manchester St/High St/Arts Centre round. Over Xmas, a publicly visible submission-time artschool piece, Rae Culbert's conceptualist amalgam of two strains of roadside displayed kiwiana craft (homemade mail boxes (rawer than Jeff Smith) and outsize produce or product (less advertising gimmick than Phil Price)) was an obscurely placed highlight worthy of note. His monster mailbox, made from a concrete mixer's bowl with a stop sign for a pick-up flag (on Ilam Road opposite the University carpark), was gymnastically followed up by a light-as-air white balloon installation whipped up and then ceremoniously popped to close High Street's last High Street site.

Above all, "Whtt" by Melissa Macleod (2-5 April) and Meanwhile by Vanessa Jack (2-11) opened in the same week to make a clearly significant separate, double bill for me; for one thing because these were follow ups to two particular personal highlights of my last year (Macleod's Rock Your World at The Physics Room and Jack's Squint in the former Hop Yick Cheong building).

Vanessa Jack presented "Meanwhile" at the usually poorly publicised University of Canterbury Fine Arts School Gallery. In that context it was a what-I've-done-since-school, long cool look that she took at something grim in the outskirts and at the heart of Christchurch. Three large, abutted lightboxes on one end of the gallery's external wall made windows onto the flat suburbs beyond. The view was of dull grey skies and the emptily normal. Three photographs were unflattering but compelling, unfussily direct representations within the academic gallery of the "real world"; candid snaps of the residential city's limits, the ends of flight paths, the grazing space for ponies. This was an unforced sampling of the banal, neatly composed in a way that vivified but added no greater mystery than to heighten our attention to something locally familiar.

Meanwhile, Vanessa Jack, School of Fine Arts Gallery, Canterbury University

With that which I would mostly turn away from, for no reason other than that there is no reason to look, she held my attention: a couple in the distance over a carless avenue, walking away with a pushchair. The "generalised pathos" that Susan Sontag diagnoses as common to any frozen moment of time past urged on the proliferation of interpretations that matched deadpan the number of ways of thinking about the whole world outside.

In Whtt (pronounced as a clipped gust while placing upper front teeth on lower lip, stopped with a flick of the tongue on and off the mouth's roof) Melissa Macleod transformed the first floor of the former High Street Project venue (all of it except that which had been the gallery space) in a playful but elaborately crafted way. Letting the building sing like a swan for its last days, she opened to the public an airy array of sculptural renovations. Concertina bellows wheezily piped air where our passage through doors squeezed or pulled them. A set of double doors spun their heads like possessed ballerinas on an axis that had been the line along which they opened . The floors of two front office rooms were pulled off the underlying beams and suspended whole, not quite balanced on pulleys. Like a situationist daydream of a malleable mansion the rooms and their layouts were remade to make us contemplatively yet participatorily aware of their being-in-themselves (as opposed to their usual, invisible, in-use being-at-hand). "This work was made for computer - not people" her handout qualified, as Macleod primarily intended this as a set to be filmed for use in a work to appear later in the year on the website Spatial State of A and B.

Jon Bywater