Journey through space and time

By T.J. McNAMARA

The medieval magician Friar Bacon made a talking head of brass. It made only one utterance: "Time was, time is, time shall be" and then fell on the floor.

This neatly sums up three exhibitions this week. The display of work by Frances Hodgkins at the John Leech Gallery shows the way we were; Slow Light at the University of Auckland's Gus Fisher Gallery shows a range of contemporary art practice and it may be that the installation by Yuk King Tan at the Sue Crockford Gallery suggests the future.

It is a commonplace of art history that Hodgkins, who died in 1947, belonged to a generation of New Zealanders who felt they had to go to Europe to find artistic fulfilment and, once departed, returned no more. The exhibition at Leech's until March 8 is yet another reminder of the rich rewards that resulted from this immensely talented artist's interaction with Britain and France, though it is also worth remembering that as late as 1949 the Christchurch public gallery rejected the gift of one of her paintings done in 1933 as too modern.

The first painting in this show is a landscape on Ibiza done in 1933. The extraordinary freedom of the handling, the sheer dash with which this watercolour is done, could only be possible if the artist had seen and gained much from such Moderns as Dufy.

What Hodgkins took with her to Europe was her extraordinary sensitivity to colour. The second work in the exhibition is called A Cornish Road and was done 30 years earlier. It is no more than a tree against a sky but the colour harmonies are rich and strange. It sits alongside another watercolour of washerwomen done the year before where the picturesque subject does not obscure the wonderful handling of the medium, even to the way the runs of paint add rhythm and life to the composition.

There are also examples of her skill in pulling together a drawing so it becomes an intricate and closely woven unity as well as her skill in making such commonplace objects as a ladder or a gate part of her delightful chamber music of colour.

An exhibition such as this, carefully collected by a dealer gallery, rescues Hodgkins from those who tidily classify her as a neo-romantic and then neglect her. In its modest way it is a reminder to all of us of the skill and delight there is in her work.

The exhibition at the Gus Fisher Gallery until March 8 is a collection of various styles of art in the late 20th century and the variety of mediums available to the artist.

Even the way into the gallery is a work of art. The entrance is hung with blue plastic and this work by Anton Parsons is designed to let you know you are entering a special place and probably should adopt the appropriate hushed, deferential attitude.

Parsons' other work in the show is another games-playing piece. It plays games with perception because it is a big, back-lit optician's chart with big letters grading down to small letters but the letters are in Braille. It is a rather cruel game. The blind can't see it and the sighted can't read it.

The best work in the show is by Jim Speers and is also made of acrylic plastic and lit from behind in the same way. This light box is glowing red with a mysterious blue streak in it and a column of light from buried fluorescent tubes.

Another fascinating use of artificial light is by Chris Heaphy, who illuminates fluorescent paint with fluorescent tubes to make colour fields of astonishing luminosity and depth.

Depth of colour but this time achieved without the use of electrics is also the mark of two minimal paintings by Winston Roeth.

The show offers a great deal of charm and delight. Notably, it offers no oil painting at all.

There is no oil painting either at the Sue Crockford Gallery where Yuk King Tan is showing work until the beginning of next month. There is a big installation on the floor with three television sets.

The installation is made of white plastic and resembles architects' models, except there is no colour but blinding white.

These are the bones of structures familiar to the artist or lodged in her memory from her training. There is a tower Tatlin might have designed, an apartment building, an arena, billboards facing each other, theatres and all manner of other buildings all cut away, open and skeletal. There are a couple of irregular rock-shapes to give a hint of nature among all this human building.

These structures are less than a metre high so you can look down into them with the eye of God. If you want to look at the televisions you have to get down to their level because, awkwardly, they are on the floor, too.

The function of the screens is to show the artist interacting with the reality of the buildings whose skeletons are on the floor. She watches television in an apartment or drives a car past an urban landscape.

The whole piece is intricate, extraordinarily imaginative and, in its own way, as illuminating about the artist's bi-cultural status as Graft (1995) with pieces of the artist's anatomy laser printed on Chinese fans which is now in the New Gallery, a room away from Blur (1996), another cultural hybrid - a magpie in a suit - that is part of the Bird exhibition.

That this gifted artist can have three works in completely different mediums on show in the city simultaneously is a tribute to the variety of effect an artist can command in this infant century.