Janet McAllister: Bright golden future for long awaited Te Uru

Te Uru Gallery on opening day last weekend. Photo / Tatiana Harper.

The monster munch roundabout at Titirangi has its own Facebook page. Of course it does. People post pictures of Happy Birthday signs strung between the giant snacks (which are actually enlarged lichen-inspired jewellery designs by Lisa Higgins).

Thanks to a 2009 paint job that turned the munch from tongue pink to teal green, their colour is a lovely match for the lighter copper-green (actually aluminium) facade of Te Uru, the long-awaited contemporary art gallery beside Lopdell House. And colour is a major feature of Te Uru.

The rich sunshine yellow of the two internal staircases is as bright as the external pseudo-verdigris. Julie Stout -- one half of Mitchell & Stout, the architects who designed Te Uru -- was asked about the stairs' hue during a celebratory public walk-through on Sunday. I expected her to reference kowhai or west coast sunsets or perhaps the golden-headed gannets of Muriwai. But no. "It's such a happy colour," she said, before mentioning that one inspiration was the daffodil stairs in a 1933 tuberculosis sanatorium designed by Alvar Aalto in Finland.

I guess if the art is to be placed in an international context, so too is the architecture.

Happily, Stout also talked about the national context. The gallery has been designed with touring shows in mind, from other regional galleries.

Te Uru can complement the large shows at Auckland Art Gallery, with more boutique exhibitions sourced from its own networks.

So can Te Uru's eastern counterpart Te Tuhi, and Nga Tohu o Uenuku in Mangere to the south.

(Incidentally, Te Uru's new clean-looking website, like that of Te Tuhi, points to the continuing, inexplicable absence of an Uenuku web presence. Why does Mangere -- which includes a busy theatre as well as two gallery spaces -- have to rely on Facebook like the monster munch fans?)

At the same time, I like that Te Uru is also making its turangawaewae a priority. Its major opening show is Te Hau a Uru - Message from the West.

In a pleasing synergy, it includes a work by Arts Laureate Lisa Reihana, created when she was the McCahon House resident on the other side of the village. It is the portrait of a god etched in a mirror: Hauauru, the West Wind, namesake of the exhibition, and the gallery itself.

Usually represented as male along with the other cardinal winds, the god here is represented by a young girl, Reihana's niece.

The gallery is handsome and needs just a few finishing touches: more seats for contemplation of both the artwork and the breathtaking view, and a fix-up of some of the hurried paint jobs.

Then Te Uru's challenge is to look beyond the artistic middle class in Titirangi and reach across the whole of its western "region".

It's already showing a reasonably diverse range of artists, but what will encourage the people who've paid for it to visit, to feel pride and ownership?

Success must include the gallery equivalent of birthday signs on the roundabout.