The galleries: Shows that compel you to come forward

There are three stages in the way people look at a painting. First they look at the title, then they stand back to get a view of it, then come forward to peer closely at the detail.

Sometimes this is just a mannerism, but there are exhibitions where it is absolutely necessary because without close study of the detail you miss half the point.

This is particularly true of the exhibition by James Ormsby, called Dance of the Marae Fly, at Whitespace in Ponsonby until October 22. This show compels close attention, most of all in the big work which gives its title to the exhibition.

Like Ormsby's previous work in this style, it is a large drawing on paper with layers of expression and meaning.

At the top is a detailed drawing of the stern of Cook's Endeavour. Underneath that is Ormsby's characteristic intricate patterning which, like leaves on a waves on the sea, is made up of marks that are always similar but always a little different.

This sea of marks is interrupted by a layer which suggests currents and seafood. It continues, interrupted only by a hard metallic circular form that suggests human uses of the vastness of the sea. Then there is the reality of the edge of the sea, a delicately sketched view of the approaches to Rangitoto.

Riding on the top of the next layer is a stylised waka. But it can't escape European influence - there is a little steering wheel perched on it.

Below that is the intricate strata of the land which dissolves into formless darkness, and below that fossilised skeletons of rats, ancient creatures of the land.

When you come close to these intricate webs, the only thing that breaks the pattern are little perfectly drawn flies. Perhaps the fly in the ointment; perhaps the power of tiny, otherwise unremarkable things.

Paintings in the show have similar breadth and detail. It is a select and thoughtful show.

In the exhibition by Deborah Crowe, called Various Pre-occupations from the Paradise Prison, at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery until October 14, you are invited to peer down a tube, as into a kaleidoscope. It is all done with mirrors.

This exhibition represents a big jump ahead for Crowe. Her work in the past was made up of boxes with intricate arrangements of fine coloured nylon thread. Then she embarked on a big, house-sized installation at te tuhi. The scale was too big for her innate delicacy but the experience gained is used here to make her boxes much more varied. Furthermore, she has been encouraged to take her preoccupation with linear compositions into photographic prints, some on stainless steel, and to painting directly on glass. All of these she does well, and the exhibition offers a series of intricate visual effects.

If we go to Parnell and the Bath Street Gallery we will find more intricate detail and bold overall effect, but done a different way.

In the work of Alice Blackley, which runs until October 28, you have to look closely to read the much-repeated words which are the basic melody of her work.

From a distance these repetitions become luminous circles, columns or mazes with a suggestion of planets or the flow of water.

This makes the images quite powerful but enigmatic, so the ultimate effect is emotional by reason of repetition.

Terry Urbahn's show alienhippiepaganrockerskeptic, at the Anna Bibby Gallery in Newmarket until October 20, offers the ultimate in a gush of detail, combined two big works which just about fill the gallery.

Urbahn is incomparably inventive. There is a DVD programme, which takes details of faces from Old Master paintings and, by sending a little wave through them, gives them an extraordinary grotesque life.

There are crazy expressionist drawings, a reworked architect's plan for a school that plants Stonehenge on Britannia Ave, and a drawing called Pile of Horseshit Number 1 which is a comment on the art scene. Spellbound involves you in the fate of plastic bottles, and two big works sit in the middle of the flood - dead black branches you wouldn't want to get close to, planted in a plinth of plaster and tawdry glass. It's all quite damnably clever but often comes precariously close to rubbish.