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.

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.

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.

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.

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.