DOMINIC THORPE @ G126

This sort of dovetails neatly with something I've been mulling over a little lately: that the artistic response to AIDS was fairly didactic agit prop stuff seems a logical response to Reaganian silence, an attempt at institution building when establishment power was doing its best to ignore a devastating catastrophe for an inconvenient constituency. It is not that cataclysmic events naturally produce politically motivated art, but silenced voices might find articulation in artistic expression.

With the exception of Mannix Flynn whose work has persistently agitated the religious/political/social forces in the systematising of clerical abuse, I can't really think of many Irish artists who are making work that tries to grapple with an issue that leaves a major scar on the national psyche as well as, in its unfolding, become symbolic of the ways in which contemporary Ireland has come to view itself. I mean maybe this disconnection w/ pre-90s ireland is a major source of a younger generation not really feeling any real relationship w/ this stuff, but even then it sort of helps psychically structure how we see ourselves now "as distinct from then"

Which is why its especially cool to see a young artist who tries to access the trauma of Abuse, and more specifically its broader abusive context of silence, in a way that is ambiguous wrt to historical specificity and vivid in its depiction of its emotional wounding.

I'm lucky, I saw this on the last day as a performance, though the exhibition continued as a display of the residue. The performance itself is an impressive condensation of bad vibes, the claustrophobically blacked out performance space lit only by handheld torches, like a fresh crime scene. The artist, somnambulantly but noisily trying to escape the gallery, scraping against the walls, splattered w/ his characteristically fractured drawing/writing on the wall (though to be honest I like that aspect more when I saw it included in the g126 group show earlier this year.)

Thorpe seems to draw on early Paul McCarthy, the phase of his career that was at once more formalist and more insidious in its intimations of violence, and the immersive horror of this show is impressive and engaging.

The residue is on display until the end of this week at g126.

Imgs courtesy Dominic Thorpe

http://www.dominicthorpe.net/

EIMEAR TWOMEY @ G126

supreme meta-text

in theory fucking with the frame, breaking the 4th wall, i am generally down with this kind of behaviour guys. This I was only semi-okay with though.

Eimear Twomey is a recent graduate and this was an impressive show for a young artist definitely. More literate and funnier than you would find in your average degree show at least. this chick is hella neurotic abt stories, or how we tell them or how we become trapped in them. The focal point is a little collection of playbooks. each bypasses the actual drama that the title introduces and has the characters talking abt the notion of appearing in a play that is abt themselves. Its weird, considering the rhizoming meta-textuality of everything now, that it felt kinda, i dunno novel maybe. Also, i mean its pretty funny.

There is almost no colour in this exhibition btw. its all b+w and maybe that's why it seems so stark, paranoid and bleak. Even the voices in the sound piece seem like black on white, spouting ridiculous/boring agony aunt shit. It was kindof the perfect illustration of why the show isn't quite as good as those books: not as original, or didn't give itself enough space to be original ("dear ---- " is way too constraining a cliche to be inventive within imo) and, to be honest, when she uses other ppl in her work, the quality of the acting lets her down emphasizing rather than smoothing over any awkwardness in the script (the guy in the videos looks really uncomfortable to be there). like this might be "part of the point" but it still isn't "convincing."

but man maybe im just way too bogged down in the painting game atm not 2 be able to see the wood for the trees with stuff like this, it makes me curious as to how ppl like this work in the studio all of a sudden. i mean, its pretty hardcore conceptual art, really existing outside of objects in a fairly convincing way.

Tulca 2009

The Tulca festival is held every year around Galway city. I suppose it's very similar in ambition to ev+a, organised annually around Limerick by the City Gallery there. Like ev+a, it pushes a programme based around video, installation and performance and using spaces outside the traditional art spaces. I've been feeling a really good vibe about Galway's art scene lately but these multimedia festivals tend to leave me a little cold for some reason so I just decided to go in to this with no preconceptions.

They didn't advertise opening night on the website, a shame because the free wine was pretty good for free wine, but a friend of mine was volunteering and we had decided met up to go drinking after. But yeah, it was in what used to be Habitat and it did a good job for the night of pretending to be a hip space in berlin r something. There was some neon on the wall and a video where some chick dumps her baby in a drawer by the side of the road (?) and for some reason all the kids seemed to be watching the slideshow of violent scenes which was pretty funny. Yeah okay I wasn't really paying attention.

Today on my lunch break I headed over to St. Nicholas where they were showing some small pieces that were really hard to find and the invigilator kindof had a fulltime job pointing them out to people. Must have been hard for her as I'd say she pointed out a video of an ear hidden under a grate to more than one tourist/person there to pray. Also some drawings that I didn't like, didn't really get this at all and it seemed a bit half formed/assed to be honest.

Also G126, this was pretty funny. I spent the bus home thinking I was gonna say something like "when did google maps become a universal signifier of planning your holiday?" and try and be all clever and knowing about it, but really I just thought this show was quite sweet. Like the raw materials were just the things that you google the night you book your flights, but it was pieced together with fun references from Steve Reich to Felix Gonzalez Torres. A big crinkled google printout of the atlantic, a stack of postcards, a video of a currach, upside down and probably fed through youtube at some point. Highlight for me was the one where they layered a line from "Galway Bay" from about as many versions as he could find on iTunes I'm guessing. Really woozy and beautiful and cute in its copping of 60's tape music. A good show, it made its concerns sculptural, assembling ideas about travel in actual spatial constructions, more than just a neat trick in my opinion.

I also legged it around the Arts Centre but they were closing and it looked boring.

RUTH LE GEAR @ GALWAY ARTS CENTRE

Ruth LeGear left a strong impression last year with her contribution to the Hou Hanru-curated EV+A in 2008. Her piece, a mixed media installation entitled Teardrops in Wonderscape, invited the viewer to lie down underneath a shimmering cluster of vials filled with tears suspended in the little containers by nothing but air pressure. There was a delicacy and inventiveness with materials and an elegant sense of audience interaction even if it did seem a little, well, cute.

As such it provides a perfect introduction to LeGears first solo exhibition mapping out all the possibilites for triumph and pitfalls that the artist has so far created for herself. In fact, it is in her handling of her own fey sensibility that the artist achieves both the most intriguing and cloying moments of this show. The work which comprises the show originates in a residency the artist undertook in iceland, and indeed the world capital of cuteness exert an overwhelming influence (I can imagine half of this stuff appearing in a Bjork inlay booklet)

The successful moments include a video installation complete with huge beanbags of dripping water. It's kind of ridiculous in a meditation-room kind of way and signals a sharper sense of humour than might be obvious in her overly cute photographs of plastic polar bears. The problem for me is maybe a discriminatory one, its just that I don't really get all this super-cute posturing.

PETER O'KENNEDY @ G126

Gah, two things i've been meaning to do for quite some time, the first one is update my blog, the second to write about G126 who are basically burning the torch for forward-looking and innovative exhibitions in Galway. Over the summer they opened a new premises in the city centre and quietly hosted a season of inventive and quirky shows by international artists. Still, this is a good month in which to comment their good work because current exhibition by Irish born artist Peter O'Kennedy showcases the venue's commitment to ambitious exhibitions by emerging artists.

The exhibition entitled Skip Roll Bump scratch is dominated by two large sculptures assembled from piping, and bits of machinery and the ambience of several sound pieces. One of those sound pieces, hissing radio transmissions, emerges from a large gramaphone speaker connected to a complicated web of piping, a stark black three dimensional drawing which dominates the centre of the small room. It feels imposing yet calmly self contained. The actual source of the sound itself is mysterious, as though the web of pipes were just a small piece of a vast constellation of interconnecting conduits.

The other piece which dominates the show, smothered by a large sheet of polythene is another large sculpture, this time seemingly assembled from parts of electronic machinery, and resembling the front of a lorry, albeit obscured by the aforementioned plastic. There is something anthropomorphically cruel about the cable ties that affix the plastic to the hulking structure which lends the room a troubling air of displaced menace.

The prints on the wall, largely photographic prints on aluminium, flesh out the artist's concerns, and kind of renegotiation of Futurism that takes on a dry immediacy as though washing off the romance of 70 or so odd years of supermensche boners and Throbbing Gristle post apocalyphta. The work seems almost fetishistically drawn to the boringness off the subject, casting aside all the sinister machinations of the glory of machinery and arriving at a language that is both immediate and casual. Pretty cool.

BREDA LYNCH @ GALWAY ARTS CENTRE

The video was kinda cool, I thought it was Lydia Lunch, rolling all over convention in some LES pit. It wasn't, it was Siouxsie Sioux, probably on TOTP.

I dunno, maybe its my ambivalence about Goth Girls in general, but I thought this show stank. Whether its Lynch's overly mannered drawing style, or the general portentous mopiness it all felt, facile? Gauche?

There is one highlight, a big lilac wall with "I ♥ Siouxsie" emblazoned across the top, its kinda cool, like what a teenage girl would do if she was given a wall in a gallery. Unfortunately Lynch doesn't take anymore cues from teenage girl's decorating schemes and the rest of the exhibtion feels too neat, the tasteful emptiness of the walls echoing the vacancy of the stuff that actually interrupted the yawning space. Sticking some popstar's face on a cat coulda been cute if the drawings themselves didn't command such a huge amount of gallery real estate. Also there are some pictures of Goth Girls, its probably about identity being performed or something, whatevs.