Birthday song sweet treat

Still covered in dots from the Kusama exhibition, the Wellington City Gallery has changed over to new exhibitions in time for the Arts Festival.

Downstairs is a truly elegant acoustic installation, The Forty-Part Motet, by Canadian Janet Cardiff, spectacular in a non-assuming and unpretentious way. A contained white room, cordoned off with stapled sound-proofing, is sparingly set up with a few benches for sitting and 40 speakers on tripods, in clusters of four or five, arranged in a circle.

The height of each is about that of an average person, with the speaker itself about the size of a human head. Each transmits the sound of one voice, so together, they make up a choir.

The piece sung has no musical accompaniment, voices alone making up the sound. It was composed by Thomas Tallis in 1573, for 40 singers for Queen Elizabeth I's 40th birthday, the Latin words becoming just sweet sounds for most of us. This lack of instrumentation and inability to decipher is important, because it leaves you with just the absolute beauty of the sound as it magically swirls around you.

It sounds incredibly simple (as of the best ideas), but as a whole, the effect is amazing. You can walk around the circle and hear the singers one by one, or sit in the middle and try and pick out where the various parts are located.

It is emotionally stirring, made more so by the stark visual of bodiless, machine singers, from which such very human sounds emit.

Across the hall, from the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland, is an exhibition of longstanding New Zealand practitioner Milan Mrkusich's abstract paintings, with their own arrangement harmonies.

Large areas of colour are set off with small triangles or inset circles. He borrows the weave of the canvas, often spreading the composition over several frames, playing with the purity of colour.

The upstairs is dedicated to Seraphine Pick, with an exhibition toured from Christchurch, where Pick originally trained. It shows a remarkable cross-section of her art, from an early work in 1994 to some dated last year.

All the works give the suggestion of hiding. Right from the early studies, with the pencilled bed frames and paper bags with eye holes (one of Pick's motifs) to the faces hidden underneath cloth or turned away, and even in the more recent, where much of the imagery is taken from external sources and rearranged, they suggest a protagonist that doesn't want to be seen directly but whose presence is only obliquely exerted.

Stylistically, although it is all Pick, it has many changes from early works with thick paint and pencil to a lighter palette with soft pastels to the later works where her figures loom, luminously, out of black backgrounds.

Seeing it together is a powerful way to view Pick's work, a continual practice, the shifts and fluctuations something that we can see as whole.

- © Fairfax NZ News