TJ McNamara: The difference is in the fine details

Heather Straka's The Asian presents a single original work, as copied by 50 different Chinese artists, to striking effect. Photo / Dean Purcell

Large collections of similar things have a certain fascination. Te Tuhi Gallery in Pakuranga, now part of the galleries of the Super City, has three shows that are all collections of similarities.

Dominating the main gallery is a work conceived by Heather Straka. She is well known as a painter of elegantly smooth images that combine glamour with inter-racial imagery, as well as studies of things as varied as high-heeled shoes and pieces of human anatomy from the dissecting room.

Here she is dissecting the copying process. While she was in China she visited a village devoted to copying Western art masterpieces. She had a painting of a glamorous Asian woman, with a flower in her hair that drips tears, leaning her gloved hand on a post with a symbolic anchor and a Maori tiki on her sweater, copied by 50 different artists.

The image, ultimately derived from an advertising poster, is a typical Straka ironic comment. The smooth, highly finished style of the painting lends itself to copying. The artists worked from a printed basic outline.

The whole project is on display as three ranks of 20 paintings. Somewhere buried in the rows is the original. The installation makes a strong immediate impact. Then there is the pleasure of letting the eye roam the rows noting slight differences such as lip colour and tones in the sky background.

Besides being so visually potent, the installation says something about Chinese attitudes to Western art and the fact that the comment is made by use of an inter-racial image makes it even more piquant.

In adjacent rooms is a collection of objects all made of gorse wood. They are the work of Regan Gentry from the time he was the William Hodges Artist in Residence in Invercargill. The installation is made lively by a cultivated eccentricity. Gentry has made a video of the rough tracks he struggled through to get at large, old gorse. The sound track is mostly heavy breathing.

The pieces are almost craftlike, though the oddity is in line with his previous work such as making a satiric arch of tyres in a parking space where a fine old theatre was pulled down.

Gorse wood is tough and twisted, with a dark patchy grain, and must be hell to work with. Gentry has made it into a lavatory bowl and seat, a chopping block with an axe and chopper, into rakes and a musket, a cradle called Old Man Nurse and a yard-stick named Ruler of the Paddock.

The whole is a comment on how "gorse has become synonymous with a colonial [Pakeha] vision of New Zealand that sought to break, shape and recreate the land" (from Aaron Kreisler in the accompanying booklet). The danger is that the theme can get lost in amusement at the sheer quirkiness of the objects.

The third collection, WK: 422, by Bill Riley, is a sculptural work in the foyer made from stacks of 5000 hand-painted sheets of recycled cardboard. The edges make abstract lines of colour reminiscent of the artist's paintings.

The arrangement suggests a model cityscape. It makes a lively, temporary installation that exactly suits the surroundings.

Equally lively but more consciously an artistic series are the groups of photographs by Bill Culbert at the Sue Crockford Gallery. Culbert has long been preoccupied with sunlight and artificial light. This show is called Light Levels. On two of the walls superb colour photographs of wrecked and useless wooden crates are transformed by light. He has taken damaged crates from the rubbish tip where he lives in the south of France, then used light to illuminate the grain of the wood. The result is an infinite number of shades of brown, a variety of textures, a sense of long use and the nature of simple constructions.

The battered structures throw dark shadows that read as great, ruined arches or, in Crate 14 XIV, a perspective view of a solemn temple. Every photo has its own quality but as an ensemble they are symphonic.

The second part of the show uses Culbert's trademark fluorescent tubes. These are placed across old window frames at various heights. The glass is still in the windows and against a white wall; viewers and the reality of what is behind them are reflected as shadows, outdone by the bright artificial reality of the tube. This is Culbert, the manipulator of light at his most characteristic.

Simon Ingram in his show Radio Painting at Gow Langsford repeats again and again plain forms within each work as individual patterns. These oils on canvas are painted by machines. In his previous show the machines were much in evidence, working in the gallery. The exhibition was interesting because of the movement of the rather awkward machines, rather than the product of their painting. This show is much more sophisticated and the results are highly effective abstract painting.

To say that the works are done by machine is something of a misnomer. The artist has devised the programmes the machine obeys. His initial material is recordings of low frequency radio transmissions by radio telescope. The rhythms are computerised into programs that control the painting of individual works. A special feature is the nature of the brush strokes the machine has been programmed to make. When the machine pauses, the brushstroke thickens.

The programming ensures these thickenings can be painted rank on rank. This regularity can produce a spectacular regular abstract image and there are two such works: Krasnodar and Ebino (the names are taken from transmitting stations). Yet the paint is not so absolutely regular that it seems as totally mechanical as a commercial or woven fabric according to a computer program.

In other paintings the strokes, vertical or horizontal, stop and start in unison, then suddenly and most effectively break into curved or peaked forms generally near the top. These forms show regular curves, but turn in different directions and in different ways.

The result adds an extraordinary energy to works like Matotchkinchar. This indicates that these abstractions produced by whatever technology can initiate a distinctly emotional human response. The process as well as the product make this a remarkable show.

At the galleries

What: The Asian by Heather Straka; Of Gorse of Course by Regan Gentry; WK: 422 by Bill Riley

Where and when: Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, 13 Reeves Rd, Pakuranga, to June 12

TJ says: Three lively shows at a gallery that is now part of the Super City. One is about copying, one about gorse and the other about stacks of paper as sculpture.

What: Light Levels by Bill Culbert

Where and when: Sue Crockford Gallery, 2 Queen St, to May 21

TJ says: Veteran expat artist who divides his time between England and France makes sophisticated photographs and sculpture out of his interest in light.

What: Radio Painting by Simon Ingram

Where and when: Gow Langsford Gallery, 26 Lorne St, to May 14

TJ says: Ingram takes a giant step forward in his exploration of painting abstract art by way of a computer program based on radio waves.

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