Light and shade of suburban life

The examiner's chestnut "compare and contrast" fits life on the art scene this week and the contrast can be quite far-fetched.

The biggest exhibition is by Gregor Kregar at the Bath Street Gallery until the end of the month. It is made up entirely of garden gnomes in glass, standing or lying on light-boxes. One necessary feature of the work is the maze of immaculate white power leads that loop everywhere on the floor to service the sculpture.

By contrast, in a group show at Starkwhite in Karangahape Rd, there are works where the leads are the sculpture. In two pieces by Stella Brennan, long black leads go from one side of a double plug to the other by way of loops and curves. It is sculpture in line.

The gnomes are brighter but just as extreme. They sit on their boxes and the light passes through them and makes them glow. They are in a variety of attractive colours unrelated to whether they are a postie gnome, a gnome holding a carrot, a thinking gnome or a gnome with a mushroom.

They come in two sizes, standing or reclining like ancient statues. The effect of the light passing through makes icons of them. Standing in groups, they recall altars with groups of saints - although very amusing, funny saints. They are also linked to the ancient fertility gods by their upright, phallic, capped shape. This fertility function could have been given more emphasis by modelling, rather than just finding examples to be used for casting.

Found images confer benefits and limitations. They come from everyday life but often will not carry the weight of meaning of an object shaped as an original by the artist.

These gnomes are disempowered and Disneyfied. The ancient link with the powers of the earth with mining and minerals has been lost.

Undoubtedly this is a large body of attractive work comparable to, but more funny, than Kregar's big installation of self-portrait statues but it does not quite fulfil its full potential.

Painting and the sculpture at the Lane Gallery until October 29 provide a striking contrast yet they both have comparable affiliations with Maori art.

The paintings of Rona Ngahuia Osborne create a primeval world of thunderous cloud and colour.

Out of the drama of this colourful tumult come little shapes like the hangings on the edge of a Maori cloak or canoe shapes that suggest voyaging. They are accompanied by surfaces of gold leaf. Both things indicate growth of understandings and treasured things. The paintings are dramatic and strong.

Circles are the essence of the sculpture of Daniel Blanshard, who makes circular wall sculpture in stainless-steel. He engraves circles in the steel and encloses within them the kind of stars and flowers that can be scribed with a compass. These have the regularity of rafter patterns and for all their engineered precision they tellingly reflect the natural world.

These images are simple but have a classic purity of line. The petals of the stylised flowers are sometimes filled with paint but this is not as effective as when the same parabolic shapes are slightly ground to alter their reflective qualities. Their polished brilliance is repetitive but seen in isolation they are visually very handsome.

At the Oedipus Rex Gallery until October 22 there is a sweet contrast between melancholy, tender, wondering youth and melancholy suburbanity.

Delicia Sampero catches the character of children and adolescents against a background that includes graffiti and fruit prices on shop windows.

The results are faces with character and a skin colour that is not real but hints at cross-cultural attitudes. The faces have a real presence. They hover on the edge of sentimentality but never really lose sight of the truth of childhood. The moods range from wonder in Birthday Boy to innocence shifting into knowledge and wariness in the two girls in Mangere Eyes. It makes an attractive show based on real knowledge of childhood but requires some book of stories to push the implications deeper.

The work by Andre Sampson in the smaller gallery should also be illustrations, perhaps for some delicately feline novel about revelations in suburbia.

Her smart, stylish women are juxtaposed with still-life of wine and cheese parties. Just a hint of entrapment gives the slickly painted hairdos, glasses, bottles and camembert a piquant spin.

There is much more than spin in the two contrasting exhibitions at Whitespace in Curran St.

What is shared in the two very different exhibitions by Emma Pratt and James Ormsby (to October 20) is a profound sense of the past.

Pratt's old-fashioned, oval, dark and green landscapes, mostly of Taranaki, express the past with brooding hills cut by the roads of modernity. The roads give a sense of travelling and the hills are loaded with a sense of wrongs.

The inspiration comes from the laments of her grandfather over the neglect of things Maori.

This is very moody work, but the work of Ormsby is linear, detailed, precise, and concerned with the mythology of Maoridom. Most of his work contains an intricate web of line and everything within that woven web is symbolic. He can make equally powerful use of a pitsaw or taniwha for historical comment.

The Whitespace exhibitions are on until October 20.