paper visual art journal –

A Q&A between Pádraic E. Moore and Gary Coyle following Hello Darkness which took place at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery from 31 May – 30 June, 2012.

P: Your current exhibition makes manifest preoccupations and obsessions that were present in previous bodies of work. However, there have been some significant developments. In particular, you seem to make many references to digitally manipulated imagery and there has also been a shift into making pieces that include areas of abstract patterns. Both these developments are apparent in a work such as Algae Bloom (Fleur de Mal).  So, in many cases figurative works that seem to suggest narrative are punctuated by formal interruptions. Can you discuss this?

Gary Coyle: Fleurs du Mal, 2012, 125x 156cm; Image courtesy the artist.

G: As you have mentioned, my work has always betrayed an interest in the common place and the everyday.  An exploration of this is – I believe – one of the key characteristics of Modernism, stretching back to Manet, who often referenced classical artworks through depicting his own immediate milieu. I use my everyday environment as a basic building block or element through which I filter other concerns and interests. The references to digital imagery I suppose reflect the fact that so much of our everyday experiences are mediated through screens and lenses. I’m also interested in the collision between the man-made and the natural – culture versus nature.

P: There are aspects of works in this exhibition in which the quotidian is elevated to something sacred or archetypal. I suppose we have touched upon this in terms of your appreciation of an artist like Manet.  Equally, you often emphasise the sinister character of suburbia. Is it the case that you believe that there is a necessity to focus upon that which lies before you, on your own doorstep so to speak?

G: I have always wondered why some artists feel the need to explore what might be considered the ‘exotic’ or the ‘far flung’. Most of the artists I really admire, Picasso, Beuys, Wentworth, Bonnard,  De Chirico, and Kounellis to name but a few, made art which reflected directly on their everyday existence and  used whatever it was that was close to hand. So, yes I do feel the necessity to focus on what lies before me. As regards the sinister character of suburbia, I have come to see suburbia as a place of extremes in which malevolence is often concealed beneath deceptive surfaces.

P: The presence of the drawn line in these works is obviously important. Moreover, your approach is clearly meticulous and at times academic. This is in my opinion integral to the power of the drawings – the confluence of traditional technical approaches with contemporary and at times disturbing subject matter. So, is ‘process’ important to you? Do you conceive of the completed image or does the act of making sometimes guide you?

Gary Coyle: Moran Park, charcoal on paper, 113 x 144, 2012; Image courtesy the artist.

G: I begin a drawing with a basic idea – “I will use this element here and combine it with this background” – but then as the drawing starts to evolve, I hope that it will take on a life and a direction of its own. I know some artists who have a very definite idea of how they want their finished work to look and they strive to implement this mental picture. My response to that has always been if it doesn’t change and evolve in the course of making, then why bother?  As regards the actual making, I try to make things as well as I possibly can. At the same time I work by erasing and rubbing out, so that chance and accident play an important role in the process, so I try and balance those two elements, one controlled and the other its exact opposite. The word academic for various reasons is not a word I would like applied to my work. One reason being is that its use is almost always pejorative, and the other is that I am for “better or worst” a member of an Academy. However, if in using that word you mean skillfully made and part of a long tradition of art making and drawing that stretches back over several hundred years, I would plead guilty as charged.

P: In several of the pieces in this exhibition you have produced works that relate to very real occurrences and factual narratives. Clearly the works can operate without one making recourse to the events. However, is it of any importance to you whether or not the viewer is aware of these events?

Gary Coyle: Haunted, charcoal on paper, 125 x 86cm, 2012; Image courtesy the artist.

G: I was at the Willie Doherty show in the Kerlin Gallery recently and I noted several of the works -  the ones that were the most atmospheric and which I particularly liked – were accompanied by information regarding what had occurred there; a kneecapping, the murder of an alleged informer for example. In a sense I felt that they were tying the image too closely to a specific event and also dissipating its power. Certainly over the course of my career – such as it is – I have dealt with some pretty dark, bleak, and sensational subject matter: Sharon Tate’s living room, Fred West’s bedroom, porn sets, and images of murderers, etc. However, I have always  – maybe foolishly – removed the specifics of the what, where, and when.  I suppose because in part I think it’s too easy to drum up interest, to sensationalise by divulging what has occurred.  Also, I have always wanted my images to take on a life of their own that was independent of the source.  The only time I have coupled image to story was my spoken word piece Death in Dún Laoghaire, and that was designed as a performance in front of an audience.

P: There is a reference to David Berkowitz in your press release for this exhibition. I believe that he is a figure who exemplifies the way in which society constructs narratives around and depictions of what might be termed ‘acts of evil’. The suggestion is that society will always construct archetypes to satisfy certain beliefs and instincts. Is it the case that some of your work is a response to this?

G: I used the Berkowitz quote, as I actually believe it is rather poetic and not at all what one might expect from a mass murderer. Apparently, Jimmy Breslin, the famous New York journalist to whom Berkowitz addressed several letters, described him as the only serial killer with a sense of punctuation. I also thought it described my own relationship with my subject matter rather well. As regards archetypes, I think these are indispensable both in  art and in life.

Gary Coyle: Arrrgh, charcoal, 22×62cm, 2012; Image courtesy the artist.

P: There are aspects to this exhibition that are clearly polemical. In particular, your reference to the obsession with Modernist architecture, which has of course become ubiquitous subject matter in contemporary art.  Perhaps in some ways your practice refutes certain codes and approaches that have become de rigueur?

G: Over the last few decades I think the art has been become quite homogenised. With more and more power concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and as a result certain styles and concerns become all conquering for a few years.  Then suddenly without warning they become passé and some new imperative has taken its place; Expressionism in the 80s, the body in the late 80s early 90s, Relational Aesthetics in the late 90s and early noughties, Modernism redux ad absurdum in mid-noughties,  not forgetting the everyday, the archive, etc. I don’t think  it’s  always been  that way, if you look at what was going on in  let’s say in Paris in the 20s, there was a very diverse range of work which received critical recognition: Pierre Kossolowiski’s wierd figuration, De Chirico’s Neo-Classicism, Giacometti’s Surrealism, Picasso’s multiple styles and investigations, Man Ray, Matisse, Brancusi, etc., I know it was a golden age and doubtless styles and theories inexplicably fell in and out of favour then too. I know it’s a pretty sweeping statement, but I think the art world now has a bad case of group think, with shoals of people swimming in the same direction. So yes, I suppose there is a rather polemical edge to the piece in the exhibition entitled  Arrgh, though I must say it really is quite tongue in cheek.

www.garycoyle.ie

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A Q&A between Brendan Earley & Pádraic E. Moore following A Place Between at the RHA Gallery Dublin, 5 March – 29 April, 2012.

Brendan Earley: A Place Between (2011-12), felt tipped pen on paper, 9×5m; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q1: The title of this exhibition evokes hinterlands, and perhaps even the abandoned building sites that characterise Dublin and other urbanised locations throughout Ireland at present. Does this preoccupation with transitional landscapes emerge from a desire to explore the possibility within uncertainty – and I don’t refer only to the current climate of economic uncertainty.

A: Well, from what I remember the title came out of a conversation with Pat Murphy (the Director of the R.H.A. Gallery, Dublin) early on in our discussions about what the show was going to look like. In the beginning there was going to be a lot more walls built, with a heavy emphasis on wandering around the gallery, but then I felt this was a little too contrived.

Apart from the obvious attraction one might have for ‘out of bounds’ areas found in places like the hinterlands of a city, the real interest I find is in their liminality. These are in-between spaces which naturally appear in cities and would happen anyway regardless of our obvious economic crisis. They lie idle and overgrown and in a semi-bucolic state, seeming to wait for something.  These places invite me in, not like a trespasser, but more like a visitor.  I think these places have a quality which stems from the fact that the labels ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ with which we normally find our bearings in a landscape do not apply.  It’s not the fields of farms but the Grand Canal beside my studio in Inchicore that are thick with wild flowers every year, for me this points to the ability of wildlife to survive in these waste lands. I really find this remarkable, nature’s persistence in the face of ceaseless change in urban areas. This gives me great hope too because I find it a bleak view to see the story of man/nature as nothing more then one of survival, with nature irrevocably opposed to man, forever just holding on. So looking at it in a more hopeful way, it is a story of co-existence, of how it is possible for the natural world to live alongside man, even in places destroyed because of our excess and greed. So for these reasons I have taken a more active interest in the possibility found in a built environment under a slow change, one that accepts uncertainty in order to develop organically.

Brendan Earley: Hunky Dory (2010), pen on photocopy and coloured paper, 29.5×20cm; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q2: This exhibition evinces a shift in your practice in several ways.  In particular, some of the drawings include figures and you have begun to use colour in an almost expressive manner. I was interested to note that you had given these works names that referred – quite specifically – to song titles. There is also clearly a reference to Tarkovsky’s films. Can you give some insights into this?

A: I think finding fragments of things on my way to or from work and reuniting them in some way has always been a central preoccupation in my work. Lines from songs that one would hear have a similar feel to the detritus I use to begin a sculpture and they (the songs) would finish them. Indeed with this show, collage became important as it provided a handy antidote to my fear of the blank page (the large marker drawings are another way out) and they also allowed me to use colour in a looser way. As well as all sorts of other bits of ephemera which I find in those large DIY stores found on the periphery of cities.

Figures have begun to appear in the drawings mostly because I decided to make my interest in certain histories more explicit, such as land art, science fiction and the Romantic tradition. This can be seen as a way of mourning the devaluation of these histories (and in particular the latter), ways of seeing that I can never have. Artists who once, with fresh eyes, discovered sublime nature as a mirror of their soul and whose discovery is now obsolete. Hunky Dory is taken from an image of Robert Morris standing in front of one of his steam sculpture/environments. So the figures, although masked or half hidden belong to the past, but inhabit the present with me as ‘ghosts’. A bit like the shadows found in the reflections of the big wall.

This large structure was built for a number of reasons, as a screen hiding the large blue drawing (A Place Between) as you came into the main space. It also confronted you as a barrier would giving as little as possible away. But one of the great things with the silver foil faced on the far side was that it disappeared into the fabric of the building once you walked around to view it from the other side. Thereby turning the wall from something which kept you out to something which let you in. In some way I think you entered the gallery twice as your reflection in the mirrored surface of the wall actually placed you in the landscape of the exhibition. This inclusion marks a change in my practice, from drawings and objects and their potential relationship to debates in architecture and history, to a deeper need to understand the cost of progress in our built environment.

These concerns are beautifully voiced in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a glacial slow, almost event free film about landscape and longing. This is a film which lingers for long minutes over broken wastelands of abandoned industry encapsulating Tarkovsky’s interest in dereliction and decay, imbuing these broken landscapes with a terrible sense of threat. Largely unable to realise the alien properties of artifacts found in the book the film is based on, Tarkovsky projected the danger into architecture itself. Passive landscapes that could swallow a man. Tunnels which tear them to shreds. These effects were never demonstrated, but also never doubted, thanks to the tentative way actors explore their surroundings.

Brendan Earley: Wall (2012), silver backed plaster board and aluminium, 9×5m; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q3: In many ways you might be considered a landscape artist and you have referred to yourself as this in the past.  This exhibition might itself be read as a kind of sprawling landscape that occupies the gallery space.  You obscure a view of the gallery so one must explore and investigate. You are surely interested in the idea that a viewer or visitor to the space has to negotiate the space and indeed, discover facets of the show for themselves?

A: I suppose the main paradigm I was taught was installation art – so all my work is considered in terms of the viewer’s role in relation to meaning found in the work, being an observer who ratifies the contract to allow meaning to appear. However this comes with certain conditions; it is not a passive role. Indeed this position runs parallel to me wondering what a contemporary landscape artist entails, if there is such a thing. I do feel we can no longer be the figure in a red coat resting on the stile as in 18th and 19th century Irish landscapes. As we pass through this land we most be more conscious, “to wander with purpose” as John Hutchinson (director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin) would put it. This sort of consciousness involves merger, or identification with one’s surroundings. Its antithesis, rational consciousness – the sort that produces Styrofoam and IKEA flat packs – requires a total separation from any sort of merger with nature. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. I am not my experiences, and so not really a part of the world around me. I am afraid the logical point of this world view is a feeling of total reification as Marx would point out: everything is an object, alien, not-me; an alienated thing in a world of other, equally meaningless things. Depressing, but I suspect it to be true, in some sort of way, of this rational ideology.

Q4: Your work evinces an interest with introducing abandoned detritus from the outside world into the studio and eventually the gallery. This process involves navigating the landscape near your home and studio in order to discover the rejectementa of society. Found components become integral to finished works. In many case, it seems that there is an almost alchemical process involved in your work. The found object is merely a starting point.

A: Yes, there is definitely a very real transformation in the objects, nothing is what it seems. The light Styrofoam becomes incredibly heavy once it’s cast into aluminum or bronze in the foundry, for instance A Million Years Later is well over 100 kg. For me the great thing about sculpture as I understand it is its power to reclaim objects for purpose. Not necessarily for a purpose but to give them an integrity, a weight if you pardon the pun. I don’t really see it as recycling, I am far too selective for that and I think for recycling to work one can’t be selective, but because I am driven by a desire to find purpose for the most trivial things I feel my wanderings are not in vain. Perhaps this is why I am driven to take even the most abject things such as a burnt bin I found outside my studio – it became the sculpture Solaris in the end. Again, like the Romantics of the nineteenth century, I would favour an open process and the fragmentary over systematic and concise, in order to be able to adjust the mind to a contradictory reality, rather then the other way around.

The only danger is this approach could be construed as some sort of romance with entropy. The places I visit are in no way a substitute for the official countryside and not to be cherished in their own right necessarily. I don’t want my work to be an excuse for the dereliction, the shoddiness and terrible wastefulness of much of our contemporary landscape. Discovering that the natural world is indifferent to the clutter and ugliness of our urban environment does not mean that we should be also. We should instead be trying to make our built-up areas more fruitful and life-giving for all inhabitants.

Brendan Earley: A Million Years Later (2011), bronze and silicon, 20×105x30; Image courtesy the artist and mother’s tankstation.

Q5: There is a melancholic tone to much of your work but equally, there are optimistic aspects also and you have used the word redemptive in terms of your motivations for producing work. So, there is a balance between these two things.

A: Melancholic, perhaps but closer to redemption I hope. I tend to see such drawings as A Place Between as being more about investing energy then finding entropy. I am sure it’s all the drawings of Smithson that give people that impression but those large drawings are more life affirming than sapping.

With titles like Red Sky at Night giving a certain delight, I wanted this show to be sure and confident even if some of the sculptures appear anything but that. In some ways the very fact they hug the ground gives them the look of a collapsed object, but the transformation is closer to a sense of growth and possibility. Using such materials as Styrofoam, plaster board, plywood and foam, mixing up consumer goods and DIY materials points to a shared, global culture (Lying Awake in an Empty Building) but this does not mean it should be viewed as embracing homogeneity but more an acceptance of using what one has at hand and allowing for contradictions to emerge. Finding oneself in a place of in-between, finding form to accommodate the mess, to paraphrase Beckett.

http://brendanearley.com/

Portraits come in various configurations. While they typically take the form of a single image bearing material integrity, likenesses built out of a sequence of impressions also inhabit time based media. Printed media, which in certain respects bridges the first two possibilities, suits less conventional subjects and forms a third option. Here I am thinking of publications such as guide books, travelogues and historical chronicles, works that concern themselves with the evocation of places and events as opposed to individuals. The engaging new publication Local Curiosities, a collaborative project by Aleana Egan & Pádraic E. Moore, operates in this manner. Presenting a portrait of the South County Dublin coastline, this work references such literary genres and diverges from them. The principal upshot of this project is that it changes our perceptions of the region and the ways in which it may be understood.

Aleana Egan: Sea-Women Posters, 2005; Image courtesy the artist.

In many respects the publication feels like a guide book. It feels comfortable in the hands, which encourages one to flip through its pages. I soon found myself doing this over and over again. Leafing through the book reveals a broad spectrum of information. Alas, a table of contents could not be found. Then it hit me: the map on its front and back covers also served that purpose and I could see the book comfortably ensconced in a pile of maps and travel brochures.

While turning the pages the eyes glimpse snippets of text and a generous assortment of newspaper clippings, various brochures, old postcards, historical portraits and views of monuments. They also come across numerous recent colour photos. These include Aleana Egan’s photographs documenting the shoreline, specific sculptures, monuments and architectural features. Examples of contemporary art work by artists such as Dorje de Burgh, Carole Cullen, Fionn Regan and Gary Coyle are also included. The initial visual experience introduces us to the textures of the location and the breadth of the area’s cultural history. Closer examination reveals affinities that cross time zones. Whereas Carole Cullen’s canvas Maroon Room (2010) evokes the aura of a 19^th century interior, images of structures built by Dún Laoghaire art students in the 1970s recall Colm Brennan’s late 1980s sculpture Stele for Cecil King and the Killiney Obelisk.

Peter Connor: Renascene Image 1 (Blackrock Baths), 2010; Image courtesy Aleana Egan.

The selected texts complement and enhance the visual material in addition to providing historical detail. Excerpts taken from the writings of Weston St. John Joyce, Virginal Woolf, Iris Murdoch and others speak of land and sea, art and architecture, and distinguished inhabitants. We read about technological developments, poverty and leisure pursuits, murder, heroism, rumour and myth. The book, for example, introduces us to the Seapoint orthopaedic specialist who claimed “malevolent lichens” cause osteoporosis and reminds us that George F. Fitzgerald, a Trinity College Dublin scientist, collaborated with Marconi to produce the world’s first live radio sports report at the Dún Laoghaire Regatta in 1898. The book, in effect, takes us down all sorts of alleys. It helps us imagine what once existed, provides context for existing fragments, and amuses through the inclusion of imaginary tales.

James Morris saw Venice as a place full of perpetual echoes. He wrote: “Here the past and the present have been repeatedly smudged, so that the old often seems contemporary and the new is quickly streaked with age.”[i] Local Curiosities paints a similar picture of the South County Dublin coastline. It takes readers on a colourful journey in which past and present, and fact and fantasy are interwoven. The work ignites a sense of wonder about some of the most common features. Its contents convey humour, It gets us questioning the potential meaning of road signs or wanting to look for house names that intimate kinship with an extremely hazy Druidic past. For residents of the area, it augments one’s sense of place and instills an awareness of local history, especially those landmarks that have or have not been preserved. It also reminds us that the built environment is anything but monotonous. Rather, it constantly changes; thus our relationship to it is subject to constant revision. Fortunately, one does not have to be familiar with the region to enjoy perusing this work. This compendium educates, elicits humour and conveys the ambiance of a unique location.  Moreover, this collectin of historical information, anecdote and contemporary works of art begets reflection, not only on what does and does not exist, but also on the complex relationship between the two and the many ways they reflect each other or intersect.

Aleana Egan: Man with a Movie Camera, photograph, 2006; Image courtesy the artist.

Local Curiosities, Aleana Egan & Pádraic E. Moore, front cover, 2011.

Local Curiosities, self published with financial assistance from Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, 64 pages, 23.8 x 14.8 cm., paper. Published December 2011. Copies of the book are available directly from Pádraic E. Moore. Contact: padraicernestmoore@gmail.com.

John Gayer is a writer based in Dublin.

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[i] Morris, James, Venice, London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1986, reprint of the second revised edition (1983), first published 1960, p.211.

Ciarán Walsh’s latest exhibition at Pallas Projects consisted of a tripartite arrangement offering viewers disparate modes of experience via a collection of static visual material, a looped video, and a booklet. Presented under the rubric this brief visual pattern, its components comprised a complex and circuitous interweaving of images and text that not only provoked viewers with their unconventional narratives, but also tested their cognitive abilities.

Ciarán Walsh: It’s Just a Shadow Away, 2011, DVD duration: 9′30″ (looped); Image courtesy Pallas Projects and the artist.

In the gallery’s back room viewers were able to drift through the Image as it Appears (2010-11) – what amounted to a didactic presentation bereft of any labels or sheets of explanatory information – and parse the links and potential meanings posed by an assortment of old photographs, painted text, a geometrical structure, and some partially obscured watercolours. While the objects’ arrangement according to a colour coded system conferred museological underpinnings, other aspects contradicted such precepts. Visual and physical access to the artworks, for example, varied dramatically and their organisation intimated no timeline or other logical type of progression. Whereas some objects had been placed beneath glazing, others rested on top of it, and translucent white paper veiled two of the images. Pictures of an aboriginal bear costume, an ancient terracotta mask, and a diaphanous hooded figure represented diverse cultures and referenced a spectrum of practices that included primitive ritual, theatre, and investigations of paranormal phenomena. Similarly, the sole 3-dimensional component contributed to this evocation of transformative possibility and mystery. The portion of the form that should have projected laterally out into space from the edge of the table appeared to have been affected by a structural quirk. Instead, it gravitated downwards directly toward the floor.

Perusal of It’s Just a Shadow Away (2011), the work in the front room, tendered an equally enigmatic experience. This looped video projection depicts two actors performing scenes from Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a Russian film adaptation of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel of the same name. Set in the bleak surrounds of a production studio, the actors speak a language neither of them understands in an attempt to convey the emotional and psychological content of a story that features conversations between a man and a hallucination of his dead wife. Even for those familiar with this slow moving tale about the strange events on a space station, the work disorients. Walsh alternates performance excerpts with English translations of the Russian dialogue. While the format recalls the structure of a silent movie, viewers first stepping into its continuous pattern of play found it difficult to tell if the translations preceded or succeeded the actors’ scenes. Though ongoing observation eventually established the correct sequence and allowed me to modify my first impressions, I initially drew what I could from the sounds of the performers’ voices and their body language. Then, as the subjects’ predicament became more legible, it also assumed greater intensity. Moreover, key words and phrases stood out, particularly the brief repetition of a short clip in which Kris’ ex-wife Hari says “listen.”  In one sense the word represented an obvious contradiction as it implied listening to a language that I could not understand. But in another it functioned as an imperative that, reworded, could be understood as ‘pay attention’, a term that implied the use of more than one’s ears. Ultimately, recurrent viewings of this charged and awkward encounter failed to dispel the video’s haunting aura. I became preoccupied with all the ambiguities of the narrative. For a time I was stranded between states imaginary and real.

Ciarán Walsh: It’s Just a Shadow Away, 2011, DVD duration: 9′30″ (looped); Image courtesy Pallas Projects and the artist.

In essence, the publication no one can arrive in the past, before they depart from the future brackets the presentation. Released in the form of a pdf file in advance of the opening and a print version, it formed an introduction, became a component of the installation, and functions as a souvenir/reference that can be read and reread long after the exhibition’s closing. The content, which clearly mirrors themes evident in the gallery works, consists of edited correspondence between the artist, curator Pádraic E. Moore and Friedrich von Bose, a scientific assistant with the Department of European Ethnology. Though it is concise, the discussion touches upon a broad range of concerns. They range from the complicated position of museum objects and established conventions associated with their presentation to notions of time travel, abstract sound poetry, non-rational responses to artwork, unobservable phenomena, and the role of the audience. Of course, the gist of the discussion revolves about the ways we experience and translate works of art and other cultural artefacts. Not only do the correspondents convey a general sense of dissatisfaction with traditional modes of presentation, they also consider ways through which it may be possible to see back to the past or circumvent such conventions. In this respect Walsh’s stimulating gallery contributions offered viewers practical experience. He has reordered – or distorted – familiar structures as a means of destabilising our intellectual footing that we might discover previously unseen information and develop new elucidations from it.

John Gayer is a writer based in Dublin.

*This review was first published in Paper Visual Art Dublin Edition 1 last November, 2011.

Curated by Pádraic E. Moore & The Black Mariah

Spectrum of Activity was a group exhibition on show at the Black Mariah gallery from mid August to mid September of this year. A version of this review was first published in Paper Visual Art’s hard copy Cork Edition, which was released in early September culminating a two week residency at The Guesthouse in Shandon, in Cork City.*

The Black Mariah gallery having moved from its temporary lodgings at the ESB Substation, is now located on the 2nd floor of the Triskel Arts Center in Cork City. Next door is the impressively re-furbished Christchurch which operates now as a cinema and music venue.

Spectrum of Activity originated from an open submission call out made by Pádraic E. Moore on the invitation of The Black Mariah; the closing date for which was the 4th of August, eleven days before the opening.

Spectrum of Activity, The Triskel Arts Centre, installation view, 2011; image courtesy Triskel Arts.

Johannes Itten’s work in colour theory is the theme for the artists’ responses. Itten, a founding figure of the Bauhaus, spent his career analysing colour from theoretical and spiritual standpoints, the latter position contributing to him being dismissed as a mystic. The works in this show respond, fittingly, in pseudo-scientific, literal and abstract ways. Tim Acheson and Meadhbh O’Connor’s fit into the former, both making sculptural works that split white light into its constituent colours, using lens and a prism. O’Connor’s sculptural installation comprises a series of test-tube holders arranged in a circle on the gallery floor, with some small plants sprouting from within them, and a series of clear, rubber tubes curling out. Suspended over this arrangement is a length of prism through which a white light is refracted into its constituent spectrum. This small rainbow of colour falls across the network of tubes that crisscross the center of the arrangement.

On a table made from two small white plinths and a plane of plywood sits Acheson’s projection, a print from Adam Fearon, and Andrew Manson’s strange Items to control colour tints for colour field theory. Like the title, Manson’s is a knowingly clumsy piece, comprised of a blocky swatch of colours painted onto small sheets of plywood, and held together with a steel loop. They splay out of the small timber case that is designed to hold them.

On the wall to the right of this collection of objects is Blaine O’Donnell’s All things are Pigment. It is here that it struck me that the loft window lights throughout the space have been covered over, allowing no, or at least very little natural light into the space. This painting shows four figures emerging from a small vitrine, running toward a sea of colour, at the center of which sits a large fragmented circular spectrum sun. All of the ‘refracted light’ that diffuses around the picture is labelled according to its colour title, i.e. ochre, lemon, yellow, umber, etc. It is twee and naff and knowingly so, but it does suggest certain colours as representative of style, or belonging to a certain era. An idea that is extended with some subtlety in Vicky Smith’s Berliners in car. In the context of this exhibition, Smith’s piece stands out and hauls the show into an entirely different direction. Her photographic print (which is fitted directly onto the gallery wall) is of another photograph that featured in a National Geographic magazine in 1982. The saturation of tone and colour of this re-representation places it into a specific era. It asks cultural questions of colour, what colour, when, for who and for what use?

Vicky Smith: Berliners in a car, archival National Geographic photo, 2011; image courtesy the artist.

To one side of this is Eoin Mac Lochlainn’s On reflections no. 4, and to the other, in the corner of the room, on the ground sit a playful collection of small, coloured, plastic moulds from John Gayer, and four glass tanks from Niamh Clarke. These tanks sit on foam tubing and each have submersible pumps in them and what looks like cocktail glasses filled with some coloured liquids. These glasses float about in the water bumping into the walls of the tanks making small, random, pinging noises.

Along the right hand side, proud of the gallery are two bare plywood walls which hold a series of re-worked posters from Donough McNamara and two more spectrum wheels in water colour from Niall Moore. Below these watercolours sits The aesthetics of dejection, a collage on vinyl sleeve. The plywood walls hide some electrical wires and some speakers from which emanates the looping and hypnotic soundtrack of Adham Faramawy’s Violet likes honey, which is a heavily doctored video piece showing scenes comprised of lurid swirls of colour which inhibit its full apprehension. The suggested narrative of the piece becomes subsumed, or collapses into the manipulation of the medium that is relaying it. This video piece is shown on a very large flat screen television that sits on the ground and leans at a slight angle against the gallery wall. The sound from this dominates the space, and instead of being a cohesive glue between the other pieces in the show, it becomes hegemonically suggestive.

The modes of visual presentation in the show suit the disparity of its content, moving as it does from the scientific, to retro twee, to child-like, to minimalist, aligning itself with none of these aesthetics fully. The works on paper in the show, perhaps by virtue of the temperature and humidity of the room, all curl up away from the walls that they are fitted upon, which creates distracting shadows behind and around them. The negation of the natural white light from this show seems counter intuitive and the interaction with the architecture of the room is at times very limp and at other times clever and attentive, no more so than with Miranda Blennerhasset’s Wall Paintings. These were made along the top stairway and in the foyer into the gallery. They are blocky, diagonal patterns with pastel colours, outlined in gold. These artworks navigate around the corners, the curves in the walls, the fuse box, and around the light switches, elucidating the space and fittings in a gentle manner.

Adrian Duncan works in Dublin.

*Thanks to Stephen McGlynn.

Other works made during this residency in The Guesthouse were shown by Barbara Knezevic, Marta Fernández Calvo and Adrian Duncan.