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.

PAUL DORAN @ GREEN ON RED

Paul Doran is most famous for a series of work that took a love of impasto effects to the level of extreme sport, burying the canvas in a rich heap of brashly swept oil-paint. His new work by comparison feels incredibly sedate at first. Reminiscent of Howard Hodgkin, Dorans fractured little abstractions recall landscape painting in their humid greens and beizes, in almost all of the pieces on show here, the surface is animated by stuttering dark marks which in most cases form a kind of frame around the central action, consisting mainly of interlocking triangles. The muddied colours open up over time as the product of garish synthetic colours which survive in tiny flashes of mottled magenta, emerald and lemon at the edge of brushstrokes. Overall a subtle and clever show but not that exciting at the same time.



Paul Doran - Untitled

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.

TERRY WINTERS @ IMMA

Signal to Noise is the name IMMA's curators have chosen for their recent retrospective of the painters last ten years. Held in the same wing of the museum that has over the last few years hosted large retrospectives for Juan Úsle and Howard Hodgkin and, like them, Winters has a canny knack for sublimating imagery into his large, dense compositions. According to the press release: "The 40 paintings and drawings explore the cerebral spaces of information technology and issues of cognition and narration as they relate to abstract painting." The exhibition barely makes a strong case for its premise, as shapes, figures, motifs and patterns are reintroduced remodelled, rearticulated and eventually dismantled through the painters brash and probing brushwork.

Not that it starts that promisingly, the first paintings we see are of more modest size and their tentative games with alternating narration of positive and negative space, seems like a big commotion over not much. The ideas of space articulated just aren't interesting enough to sustain the bombastic streaks of paint that criss-cross the canvases.

But then something changes, we move into the smaller rooms, where monochrome prints display a nice feel for placement, a certain crude brashness which is effective in ways it doesn't seem to be in paint. the rough scribble that he uses in place of hatching has a childlike charm and a crooked violence. The sheer number of them on the wall forces the curators point about information systems in overload but its obviousness is effective in a way that echos the prints themselves.



Terry Winters - In Blue

Suddenly the large canvases reappear, but this time, in such wild colour that they seem garish and overwhelming even without being rammed together from floor to ceiling. Mainly composed of large floating grids of rose-like configurations of space and spirograph designs. In the larger pieces the variations of the rose patterns bursts into three dimensions as they push and pull against each other and the picture plane, swirling around each other.

MARK SWORDS @ KEVIN KAVANAGH

Mark Swords latest show at Kevin Kavanagh, according to the blurb: "displays an increasingly intuitive engagement with various approaches to painting and art making." What emerges at the show, rather than a ludic free-wheeling playfulness, rather a wondrous enchantment with a sort of playful dissection. Motifs from manky bits of carpet and fabric are carefully dissected and rearticulated through paint, collage, embroidery etc. A rich awkardness pervades the show, which feels like the perspiration of a painter realising in front of you how tricky the project he has set for himself as he teases out the pictorial strands that comprise the various paintings on show (his literate yet neurotic style also provides a brilliant foil for the few flashes of wanton bravura!)



Mark Swords - Carpet

The first painting that welcomes you obliquely is Carpet, which like all the other pieces on show is of modest size. Riffing on tension between the pattern of a patch of carpet and a Heilmann-esque zig-zagging design, Swords interrelates each element of the painting in such a brittle agitated way, the painting teeters on the brink of resolution and as such provides an excellent point of entry for a show that creates more itches than it scratches.