LOCKY MORRIS @ MOTHER'S TANKSTATION

There's something really awesome about enjoying a show that does a lot of things that have become automatic turnoffs. The current show, by Derry-based artist Locky Martin, trades in a kind of anecdotal neo-Conceptualism, in the vein of Sophie Calle. I see this stuff more at degree shows & c. and its really something that seems a bit tired. Mainly what was refreshing was that it seemed to abandon the two major crutches that you usually come across with work of this kind: an overly elaborate tricksiness or an over-ripe fascination with its own retro-isms (you know the kind of polaroids and super8 stuff that really gets caught up in empty nostalgia real quick)

The centre-piece of the show is a sound/sculpture installation based on the cover of a recording of Chopin Preludes, a piano seen through a rain-streaked window, a view the artist found eerily like the view of a piano seen through the door of a church near his studio. A photograph of this, along with the record sleeve itself and a haunting, repeated piano chord recorded in the studio itself are hung around a piano top. There's a definite nakedness about the presentation, eloquent and beautiful but no overt cleverness or cute resolution.

I mean there's something throw away, but also fresh-feeling about the photograph of a splayed white dog lying next to an upturned plastic lawn chair, the way it rhymes the forms is funny and smart without being glib and knowing. I guess its an attitude thing I enjoyed about this show, not exactly innovative or new but capable of striking the right chord and with a generous individuality.

I feel like a big part of the kudos for these shows at MTS has to go to the gallery itself. I've been to a few shows here, and while I understand that they have some unique ethos or whatever, I won't pretend I really know what it is, just that whatever it is it seems to work. For a start, every show I've seen here has been so confidently staged, I'm thinking here of the sculpture that is just the empty blister-packets of antacids held in the slide-holder from a projector. But, and I don't think this is beside the point here, it looks good. It sits in the space with a kind of airy insouciance.

I think its a pretty huge credit to this place that I've never managed to go there w/o getting into a coversation of some kind with one of the staff, usually the gallerist herself, and always initiated by them. I mean there's this genuine feeling that they want people to come and see the art on show here, and on this particular occasion i got a lot out of the brief chat I had with the assistant working there. Her take on the pieces was interesting and I especially liked her pointing out the anecdote behind From Day One, the piece which lends its title to the exhibition, a card collar holder from his daughter's shirt left lying on the carpet, preserved here -square piece of carpet and all- in a square glass vitrine. His poor wife she said, imagine the empty square left in their sitting room.

MARK GARRY @ KERLIN

theres a moment in this exhibition where you look up @ "Folds", an installation made from a rainbow of sewing-thread strung from one-wall to another, and the thing has disappeared, what you see is just the soft radiation of colour, like the little rainbows you see when someone waters the lawn in summer. Its kindof amazing, and even though the poetry of it feels a little cheap, its sort of the point.

I mean i was rollin my damn eyes when I saw that the little feather palm tree (garishly yellow!) was called "to say a psalm for now" i mean lol its great, like a joke your dad would tell. But when you see it from across the room it leaves a reflected yellow circle on the wall.

Anyway pretty good, its got a bit of Jessica Stockholder abt it, I mean the overall aesthetic is pretty Euro Two but there are moments when something else bubbles up and punctures that (felt like the balsa-wood flowers were him jamming his tongue way into his cheek tho) but it didn't make me think abt the universe, or anything at all really when I left (also there was like three things that i didn't "get" like at all) but thats just me i guess.

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.

ISABEL NOLAN @ KERLIN GALLERY

You know those shops that sell vaguely modernist home decor art? You know, half assed appropriations of Abstract Expressionism only in shades that will match your new couch. Well that's what this exhibition kinda reminded me of. I don't mind that, in fact I think its kinda funny! It's the reverse of making paintings that look like dulux color cards, fine art refiltering itself thru its own appropriation by um Ikea maybe. Nolan gives you stacks of Tuttle-octagons, watercolours of Degas sculptures and Munch sunsets. Wished there was more focus on painting, the sculptures do have a roughly hewn precision and a funky, eclectic use of materials, but Nolan does have nice, insouciant touch and her bright primaries are strained and stretched at the edges in a way that sets up its own tensions, distinct from the appropriated compositions. Also, embroidery tables? Give me a break, shit's been done really.

NOUGHTIES BUT NICE @ LCGA

This was obviously never gonna really work as a broad survey of contemporary Irish art, but seriously get one clue Limerick City Gallery. Even the Seán Lynch was pretty rubbish. Amanda Coogan should be banned from inflicting her rubbish overly literal performance videos on the world in my opinion and also since when is over the hill nearly ran John Shinnors an emerging voice? Limerick City Gallery reeks of the kind of cronyism that all the american painter blogs are crucifying NY's New Museum for at the moment. Good thing this thing is almost over so you can miss it.

Update.

This has been extended until 20th December, so you have another month to be excited by irish art NOW.

A few other things from Dublin

What is the deal with the Cross Gallery, they always have semi-cool stuff downstairs and boring mom-art upstairs, well the two times I've been there. I think downstairs might be called "nag" and be their emerging art things maybe. Anyway, downstairs is worth a look, but I'm too lazy to go into it right now, long day, etc.

Are Monster truck ever open?

I liked the thing I saw in green on red, there was one drawing done by scratching out a mirror and another done by printing on the back of reflective Glass, space used really nicely to show big silvery video, drawings were pretty great. This was it btw.

Went to the Munch exhibition in the National Gallery. Didn't think I was a huge fan, but holy shit could he draw!

Kathy Predergast in the Kerlin was a bit disappointing, was a bit like a third year crit, esp. with douchebaggy NCAD seminar taking place there. Reminded me why I was so glad to finish art school haha. Lots of stuff with inked out maps, not as compelling as here map drawings and seemed a bit tossed off to be honest.

I liked the thing that was about sports maybe in the RHA with the big sculpture, some of the paintings were really stunning and the whole thing had a snottiness about it that in a weird way reminded me of Infinite Jest (which I will one day finish I swear). Hadn't a clue what it was about though.

I knew Mother's Tankstation was gonna be closed but I still checked cos I am a loser like that. Love that place, hope I catch the next thing that opens.

That's pretty much all I can remember, but I have a feeling I'm forgetting some stuff.

PHILLIPE PARRENO @ IMMA

This was kind of fun. Just a good old fashioned head fuck in my opinion. Okay there were easy points made on the deconstructive potential of cultural detritus but I was more interested in how it used the space, activated it, moved around it. The voice of the woman from the video piece that echoed and careened through the rooms of the gallery The yellowing of the windows and the shiny things. It was a bit empty, but it was entertaining, and you could see the whole thing in a few minutes. Great info sheet too, like a randomly torn page from one of those Phaidon books.

LYNDA BENGLIS @ IMMA

Feel like there's an essay in the works on this one, so I'll keep it brief here. This was a great show and one of the reasons that IMMA have been restoring a lot of my previous faith in them after a dodgy couple of years. Lynda Benglis, best known for her ARTFORUM ad featuring her wearing nothing but sunglasses and an, um, dildo, emerged as a figure from the New York Painting Scene of the late 60's early 70's. Thankfully this period has overgone a huge reappraisal in recent years with figures as diverse as Mary Heilmann and Joan Mitchell re-emerging as important and influential. Benglis' work from this period is aggressively feminist in rhetoric, but in its lush materialism and sly disruption of formalism, seems to anticipate queer 90's artists Felix Gonzalez Torres (pro tip for blog readers, if I align anybody with FGT it means I am about to say I like them) and Roni Horn.

I suppose it would be suitable to cite Robert Morris or Judy Chicago, both artists whose awareness of the gendered rhetoric of Minimalism in particular informed their work (Chicago, before she embraced large installations on feminist themes, made quietly prettified Minimalist sculpture) Neither of these artists approached the formal subversion of Benglis though, her flamboyant and gaudy sculptures deconstruct the maleness of the previous decades of american art, the ejaculations of Jackson Pollock and the cool supermensch boy-toys of minimalism, and remake them as bawdy, excessive and bodacious visions of camp femaleness.

Working with latex, wax, plaster, glitter and vibrant acrylics, much of the show has the appearance of Mardi-Gras float casualties (especially due to the repeated use of chicken wire to give many sculptures structure) But it is in this free-floating garishness that the artist stumbles across her radicalness, her affront to bourgeois tastefulness. While her work is lacking in the nuance and subtlety of Mary Heilmann, it makes up for it with sheer willpower. Considering how long it has taken this period of recent history to become canonised, her aggressiveness seems justified yet how odd to think that in a world where Warhol was the most famous living artist, that it took so long for this post-pop abstraction to gain respectability. Still, it is in its persistant un respectability that this show is so much fun, in all its kinky, rubbery trashiness.

on now etc.

Fergus Feehily is now on at Douglas Hyde, I am a huge fan and this should be pretty awesome, show is called Pavillion.

Kathy Predergast is currently showing at the Kerlin Gallery, show is called The Grey before Dawn.

Niamh O'Malley is on at the Green on Red showing a new video piece.

Bridget Flannery is showing at the Cross Gallery and it looks pretty worth checking out.

Paul Nugent at Kevin Kavanagh

Don't really understand what the exhibition happening at Pallas Projects is but it looks intriguing

Black Mariah is still showing my old tutor Mark O'Kelly

Also, I am graduating in a couple days so i'll have the skinny on this Noughties but Nice expo in the limerick city gallery.