KEY POINTS:
Still-life painting, photo-realism in paint, and photography are all concerned with time. They fix a moment in the past.
Still-life is an unfashionable genre but it has persisted because the exact representation of objects exercises a continual fascination. Often though, there is more to it than representing appearance and this is certainly the case with the exhibition by Glenda Randerson, at the McPherson Gallery until June 23.
The objects are the enduring, simple forms of bowl, jug, plates and cloth. These are painted with a traditional technique of putting glaze after glaze of transparent oil paint over a solid, gesso ground. The technique exactly suits the subject because these jugs, bowls and plates are white enamel with a black or a blue rim. The delicacy captures the whiteness of enamel and the luminous shadows cast on it, and also those inevitable chips that mar the immaculate surfaces.
This kind of ware belongs to at least two generations ago. Although there are surely some who still remember putting the billy out for the milkman.
Billies feature in several of these works and their squat rotundity is a counterpoint to the elegant ellipses of bowls seen in perspective. The billies evoke nostalgia and are brilliantly done, yet they do not quite match the elegant way the lipped forms of the jugs play off against plates and dishes.
The white of the enamelled work is set against simple backgrounds and here and there the blue, characteristic of Randerson's still-life or portrait work, is used effectively in mugs and rims of dishes.
In this quiet exhibition the technical excellence of the painting transforms everyday objects into magical things evocative of daily routine and time past.
Photo-realistic painting fixes a place and a time but photography has a more documentary quality, that can be a record or have a point of view.
Marti Friedlander's show Shadows and Light, at FHE Gallery until June 21, covers her work from as early as 1965 with a picture of a young Don Binney on the west coast beaches he loved to paint.
One aspect of the show is the recording of artists. The most telling photographs are of the wild hairy countenances and intent eyes of Philip Clairmont and Ralph Hotere. There are also shadowed doorways and bright, barefoot children, dark men against desert sunlight and, magically, a bright line of foam against dark sand.
This is not a large show but it is a tribute to a lifetime of sharp eyes and quick decisions.
Speed is part of the essence of Movingstill, a large and rewarding show that covers many prominent New Zealand photographers, at the Gus Fisher Gallery in Shortland St until July 14. It is part of the Auckland Festival of Photography.
This exhibition comprises still photography and video screens. It recognises that we now have habitually in our hands mechanisms - cellphones - that enable us to choose between catching anything that takes our eye as a still photograph or a video clip. We can also take a moving image, press the pause button and make a still photograph of it.
So this exhibition is apt as it explores movement in reality or fixed as a moment. It ranges from the turning pages of a weather diary, through ice tumbling over a fall, to the scrambled moment of a fight in a pub.
It is a fascinating show with far too much detail to be dealt with in a short review. It is nicely complemented by Hotel North America, by art writer Gordon H. Brown, which records the mundane elements of North American hotels he stayed in on a trip in 1974. Lavatories, basins and televisions are redolent of another place and time.
The fine panoramic photographs of Alexandra Cunningham, at Oedipus Rex until June 22, exactly capture the here and now -a large area of land north of Christchurch, bulldozed to make a satellite town that will "reflect the New Zealand way of life". They raise the question: is it the New Zealand way of life to devastate the landscape to make a tidy town?
The panoramic format emphasises the extent of the operation yet the photographs, mostly in black and white, with touches of pale, embattled green, have an intricate splendour that works a visual alchemy while making its ironic point.
The works of veteran, internationally published photographer Harvey Benge, at the Satellite Gallery in St Benedict's St until June 16, is intensely intimate. They are made up of two images that juxtapose sharply observed details of daily life that may have some visual connection, even if it is no more than a torn edge of material or the highlit black shape of a pencil against the a bottle of yellow dishwashing liquid.
The show emphasises how personal photography is both in the eye of the artist and the response of the viewer.
