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/

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.

STEPHEN GUNNING @ MOTHER'S TANKSTATION

I spent longer watching the two videos that comprise this show than i normally do (i am hella philistine abt video in gen.) for a number of reasons but they were all pretty practical. Mother's Tankstation is the furthest out of the city's galleries and since it wasn't open when I walked out past NCAD I had to come back later especially. And it was cold, and I kinda had a headache and I didn't really wanna get back out into the weather so I just kinda chilled there a bit.

And I'm pretty glad I did. Duration feels important in this exhibition. Just inside the door there is a looped shot of a the feet of that Turkish (dancing) where they wear those full length tunic things and spin, I wanna say Dervish. The soundtrack is a bit like some 90's dubby techno with the beats dropped out, slightly menacing and purposeful sub-bass frequencies. Its hypnotic and strange, and in its abstraction of a specific cultural form it signals the theme which is not really so much being discussed in this exhibition as it haunts it or clings to it. Something to do with cultural tourism, a kind of fetishistic Otherness.

The main gallery is a static shot of tourists coming and going from a mosque, taking scarves from the pile provided, putting their shoes in little plastic baggies. Its effect is cumulative, just the repeating of the gesture over and over it becomes ritualistic in its own right, but also operates in the interstices whereby two cultures interface with each other but not in a waythat is abt engaging with each other, more abt watching each other, reducing and fetishising. I felt woozy and strange after watching it.

Stephen Gunning - Journeyman @ Mother's tankstation, exhibition runs until 13 Feb, 2010 4-6pm daily.

G126 @ RHA

i guess its fair to say that g126 have an "aesthetic." Like its not somewhere you take your friends who don't "get" "art" or "whatever." They show a lot of stuff that isn't painting and not really sculpture, but like video, readymades and installation. They like stuff that looks like it was done on an office printer and then pasted to something made out of MDF and packing palletts, you know, kindof austere but trashy and pretentious/unpretentious.

This show was good but seemed small? I assume there are loads of members and I woulda liked to have seen something more inclusive, like even someone as dumb abt local art as me recognised most of the names. And despite that it was patchy, Kevin Mooney's paintings are way better than they seem in jpeg form, twitchy and abrupt but with sudden passages of bravura, kinetic brushwork, they seem to play off competing senses of space (surface design v. photographic pictorial space)

Also Fiona Chambers cross-stich sets of kitch jpegs was pretty inspired in its decision not to actually make the things up, but to display them as little kits for sale (I couldn't be sure if they were in fact for sale for €25 each, I prolly woulda bought one if they were, btw my email is in the sidebar fyi) and it was clever about the distinction between handmade and electronic and the internet as a folk-art museum which was surprising bc ud think that subject ran out of milage circa 2004 at the latest.

Dominic Thorpe reminded me of Glenn Ligon via bad acid and was probably the thing I enjoyed the most out of this show even though in some ways it was the same kind of lame joke that Breda Lynch and Padraig Robinson were tryna pull, (like i actually couldnt believe that coco-pop hirst steez wtf u guys)

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.

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.

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.

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.