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/

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)