KEY POINTS:
The expression "point of view" can mean literally where artists stand to look at what they are going to paint and, metaphorically, it means what is the artist's attitude to the subject.
To respond to a work of art, you have to subscribe in some way to the artist's point of view. There are three exhibitions this week that have almost sold out, which surely indicates many people share the artist's world view.
Robyn Kahukiwa, whose show Supa Heroes for my Mokopuna runs at the Warwick Henderson Gallery until December 1, conveys a radical, feminist, Maori view. Her "Supa Heroes" owe a lot to Wonder Woman. They have her gear but they are also equipped with moko, tattoo around their upper arms, a mere or taiaha in their hand and their headbands, jerseys and tights have Maori motifs. What they swoop to rescue are children; the promise of the future.
The style is the hard-edged, illustrative manner the artist has used since her early explorations of Maori mythology. The effect is of highly coloured, vigorously designed cartoons and, as befits a polemic, they are savagely one-sided. In one work, a Maori man surrenders to the seduction of a Pakeha and the resultant child is rejected as not having the appropriate lineage.
These paintings make an aggressive political statement reinforced by the strong colour like a banner. It is always debatable whether art changes anything. These images make the artist's stand clear but it is unlikely they will alter anyone else's. They will be enjoyed for their colour and verve rather than their rhetoric.
Although the style is far from comic book, there is also an element of child-like naivety in Richard Lewer's As I Stepped out into the Bright Sunlight, at Oedipus Rex until December 7. The naivety of style is appropriate in some ways because Lewer is working with memory of childhood, and memory simplifies and blurs the experience. His work is often autobiographical and this exhibition was triggered by his return to Hamilton for his grandmother's funeral. One of the most effective works is Nana Mills, depicted in the dark of the past within the shape of an old-fashioned brooch.
Funerals bring families together and one series of the paintings shows people posing for photographs in the garden. Their faces are pink and featureless because they are in the process of constant change. Conversely, what is very exact in these curiously touching pictures is the depiction of the poses people adopt in group photographs.
The water deepens in paintings of the funeral. There is the bright New Zealand sun, the modern architecture of the church, the exaggerated length of the hearse, the inescapable rectangle of the grave and the people involved are "bare forked animals". The mourners look like wraiths because sooner or later they too will pass. What is particularly interesting is the space between their legs which has a hood shape like the grieving ghosts that might appear at the foot of a deathbed.
The sheer oddity of these paintings somehow works to emphasise the reality of place and the transience of people. Although the style slips easily into silliness, notably in the picture of a figure with raised arms called We Lift Up Our Hearts ... We Lift them Up to The Lord.
Lewer also has some works based on the discovery of an old scrap book of rugby heroes. He has made some little paintings that once again have no pretension to being exact portraits but try, sometimes successfully, to be the memory of the hero rather than the actuality.
The popularity of these works means they must strike a chord with some sort of communal memory.
The point of view of the extravagantly large exhibition of Piera McArthur at the Soca Gallery until December 6 is that her art is a great romp of red, full of life, energy and amusement. To convey this point of view, she attacks her large canvases with great stringing, swinging strokes that are half painting, half drawing and all caricature. It was interesting to compare the quiet professional dexterity of the musicians who played at the opening with the wild gestures of the three paintings of pianists, one of which is a big bosomed woman, naked except for earrings playing improbably without a piano stool.
Bosoms feature a lot in McArthur's work, alongside the frequently recurring red toe nails, but they are always curiously sexless because they are stylised to the point of absurdity. The sheer exuberance of the viewpoint that everything in life is gay and marvellous can end in nonsense like the picture of a chef boiling a sad calf's head in a pot or people leaping out of a glass of Dom Perignon.
The paintings of Gaylene Earl, whose Landscape Subdivision Series is at Satellite Gallery in St Benedict St until December 2, are not completely persuasive in terms of the stated aim of making the viewer aware of land abuse. Instead, the viewer may take the point of view they are landscapes done with a sensitive touch and considerable knowledge of the land despite being symbolically chopped about.
