TJ McNamara: Ordinary subjects made magical

A still a video by Jill Kennedy. Photo / Greg Bowker.

All art builds on tradition. There are various ways of reaching back to the past.

The judge of this year's Walters Prize suggested that the winning work referenced the innovations of Marcel Duchamp, whereby found objects were, by being shifted into an art context, made precious and significant.

The exhibition by Jude Rae at the Jensen Gallery reaches much further back into the tradition of still life painting. Her work is often compared to Italian Giorgio Morandi, the most famous 20th-century painter of still life. However, Morandi plastered his paint on thickly. Rae's surfaces reach further back, to the 18th century and the work of Chardin, who took the pots and pans of the kitchen and transformed the commonplace into something that glowed with an inner life and had a magical presence.

This exhibition is entirely of still life and may seem limited because the subject matter is a variety of bottles stripped of their labels and ranged on a simple table, but it does confer on them something of Chardin's radiance.

There is a deliberate avoidance of the sentimental. None of the objects - brown and black bottles, big translucent water containers - are intrinsically attractive. It is the dignity conferred on them by the paint that makes them so arresting.

Water containers with translucent pale blue plastic are a particular feature. They are modelled completely in the round and the slight change of tone needed to show the level of liquid in them. So many painters doing still life run a sharp edge around their objects. The edges in Rae's still lifes are soft when seen close up but are solid and sharp when seen from any distance, though they retain the luminosity of the light diffused around the edge.

The colour is harmonious, with grace notes often a stopper in a vessel or the bright red of the edge of the table. The tables are important. The vessels sit firmly on them and their edges give weight to the composition; the dark underneath is important because it emphasises the way the objects on the top exist in space because of the light that falls on them.

The big Jensen Gallery could overwhelm such deliberately undramatic painting but the simplicity and strength of the works makes them effective when isolated on the plain walls.

Two exhibitions use the modern media of television and add sound to their work. Both of them contain exhortations to "Breathe". Both use projection as the means of communication so that instead of just looking you have to listen and, of course, breathe.

At the Antoinette Godkin Gallery, Jill Kennedy calls her show One Minute Enlightenment, though the works range from three to nine minutes in length. They have thematic and visual links within them but no narrative. A great deal is left to the imagination of the viewer to link the toys, dolls, cats and collages into some sort of coherence.

In Canaries in Colour, drawings of canaries seem the principal ingredient until circular patterns appear, of the sort made by a Spirograph toy. Everything advances and recedes to a soundtrack of piping noises and a heavy bass.

Two more works - Better Military Modeling and At Home with the Ants - employ paper cut-outs of 19th-century military music and close-up observers of an ant farm scene from the point of view of the ants.

The title film shows a man and a woman breathing ecstatically and text exhorting the viewer to do the same. Then there are a number of appealing images of cats. The flourish here is the eyes: at times they roll in a way that makes them appear to be detached from their sockets. Sometimes the lively eyes are replaced by a spiral that displaces them with hard, ruthless geometry.

It is worth having the patience to watch these things and enjoy their visual bounce but they are hard put to compete with the smooth presentation of commercial video.

The second show of three artists is at Starkwhite and is more radical. A work by New Zealander Dane Mitchell is a large dark screen, on which viewers can almost convince themselves that there is obscure writing. But if there is, it can't be read. Nevertheless, from behind the screens the voice of the artist speaks continually about the world. And concentrating on the black space of the screen is supposed to concentrate the viewer's aura-sight. There is an accompanying film that shows the big dark screen in the bush, looking as odd as a drainpipe in a forest.

Then there are whole series of grainy black-and-white photographs collected by Tamar Guimaraes from Brazil. They document the life of Francisco Candido Xavier, famous for communing with the dead and writing books about the necropolis they inhabited.

You have to go upstairs to a dark room to communicate with work by Georgina Starr from Britain. She recorded communications from various psychics on an LP record that spins in the middle of the room.

Each groove has a message and you are invited to give the arm a little knock and find a psychic message at random. It is mysterious just the once.

At the galleries:

What: Paintings by Jude Rae

Where and when: Jensen Gallery, 11 McColl St, to November 6

TJ says: Studies of plain bottles on a table are magically made into luminous meditations on light.

What: One Minute Enlightenment by Jill Kennedy

Where and when: Antoinette Godkin Gallery, 28 Lorne St, to October 30

TJ says: Inventive and lively, collaged non-narrative videos supported by soundtracks by John Payne.

What: Beyond by Tamar Gimaraes, Dane Mitchell, Georgina Starr

When and where: Starkwhite, 510 Karangahape Rd, to November 3

TJ says: Realms of the dead evoked unsettlingly by words from a dark screen, old black and white photographs and a recording of the voices of mediums.

Check out your local galleries here.