The galleries: Richness in ordinary things

The Village (Rose) is an example of Gavin Hipkins' vertical works with an image and plain colour.

Some weeks you have to hunt out the good things in the far reaches of Parnell and Karangahape Rd. At Starkwhite, at the far end of K Rd, are two fine exhibitions of photography.

The most curious is up the stairs and along the corridor where it has two rooms to itself.

First you pass through the main gallery, where there is an exhibition by Gavin Hipkins, an outstanding photographer of the new generation.

The show, called The Village, is a collection of observed details which collectively make up a portrait, not of a particular village, but any village - especially, perhaps, one near the sea.

We get glimpses of museum exhibits, of industry, of gardens and even a doorknocker.

Each image is impressive, but the complete installation would be a museum piece.

Hipkins has always been keen on long works that hang vertically, and each work here is a long hanging with equal areas of image and plain colour.

The colour is complementary - a touch of red on the copper of a diver's helmet is supported by a rich red above. The blue roof on a cottage in a garden of roses links with an area of plain blue.

The overall image could seem conventional, as in a picture of a house and rose garden, but the sheer honesty of approach makes it real and important.

Cleverly observed details are like shards of memory simply balanced with plain colour to give a feeling of richness, whether they are ordinary things such as a coil of rope, or unusual things, such as the skeins of stitching on a hand-bound book.

A good eye, fine technique, imagination and documentation all combine in this impressive show.

You must go upstairs to see the more deliberately documentary set of photographs by Ann Shelton.

It is called A Library to Scale. The scale is important. Because the photographs show the exact size of the books reaching from floor to ceiling, smaller photos of the collection have much less impact. This is one of those shows that the more you know about it the more curious it becomes.

Yet like all good art it has an immediate interest, whether or not you know the background.

The photographs are taken directly in front of steel shelves crowded with books in a New Plymouth museum.

All the hundreds of books look like one of those suburban lending libraries that you once could find at the back of a stationery shop.

Like the books in such libraries, these volumes are covered with wallpaper.

They present all sorts of patterns. When you look closely, it is apparent that each volume has a label pasted on, which is not a title at all but a category of life in a small town - births, deaths, war, council proceedings, and dates given on the back. The whole ensemble is visually extraordinary.

What we have is one man's life work, a portrait of this man, Frederick B. Butler. What are outwardly books make up an immense archive where Butler - born in 1903 and who lived most of his life in New Plymouth - devoted himself obsessively to pasting material about the town into old volumes. He turned the books upside down to work on them but where the wallpaper has come off some volumes we have titles redolent of a past age.

So we get "By Pike and Dyke" written by the stalwart of the boys' historical novel and Boy's Own Paper, G. A. Henty. There is even a book titled In a Hand of Steel, which unconsciously reflects how this lifetime's work is now museum material on steel shelves.

The subject of crime occupies 97 volumes, education 104. There are 46 volumes of World War II casualties.

The life of a man and the life of a town are captured here.

No one except the most passionate historian is likely to read any of them. But what Shelton has done, in a masterly way, is to choose the scale, lighting and layout in a way that makes a work of art out of the collection and allows our imagination to play on the contents.

There are only a couple of days to see these exhibitions, but they should not be missed.

Photographs are combined with drawings in a show at the nearby Michael Lett Gallery where, until the end of the week, Matt Ellwood makes great play with the ironies implicit in cigarette advertising of a generation ago.

Sometimes he combines the cool advertisements showing waterfalls in a seamless way.

More tellingly, he links the slogans from cigarette ads and Playboy magazines with big drawings showing people in the style of the 70s in situations where women gaze adoringly at men in turtleneck sweaters.

They are supposed to exemplify the virtues of the wealthy and talented but now look absurd. The juxtapositions are extremely clever.

The ironies are potent but the satire is aimed at targets that were well peppered long ago.

Parnell's Courtyard Gallery has, until Monday, a thoroughly worthwhile exhibition by one of the important but lesser-known painters in New Zealand.

The work of Jean Horsley was little seen in her lifetime but from her legacy of hundreds of paintings, a selection has been made that shows how courageously she brought together her study at Elam and her experiences in London and New York to make canvases that were radical in her day, as her work developed from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Works such as her Waitakeres and her paintings with poems lettered across them are of lasting worth.