The May – June 2018 issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet is out now and available in galleries across Ireland.

This issue has a timely focus on several important exhibitions currently showing in galleries nationwide. On 13 April, the 38th edition of Ireland’s contemporary art biennial, EVA International, opened in various venues across Limerick city. EVA will run untill 8 July with several off-site projects also taking place in IMMA. Mary Conlon interviews EVA 2018 curator, Inti Guerrero, for this issue, offering insights into Guerrero’s curatorial research and exhibition-making strategies.

Meanwhile, a number of exhibitions and projects are currently taking place across Ireland to celebrate the diverse career of Irish conceptual artist and critic, Brian O’Doherty, who marks his ninetieth birthday this year. Brenda Moore-McCann’s extended essay outlines some of these events, while reflecting on O’Doherty’s vast artistic legacy.

Alice Maher’s solo exhibition, ‘Vox Materia’, is currently showing at The Source Arts Centre, Thurles, and will subsequently be presented at Crawford Art Gallery from 7 September to 24 November. Tina Kinsella interviews Maher about her new bronze sculptures and wood relief prints. In other features for this issue, Lily Cahill reflects on the sculptural practice of Hannah Fitz, an Irish visual artist currently based between Dublin and Frankfurt. Fitz’s solo exhibition, ‘Knock Knock’, is showing in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios until 30 June. In addition, Joanne Laws interviews Alison Pilkington about her touring exhibition, ‘How We Roam’, currently showing at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon until 2 June, before being presented at the RHA Ashford Gallery in autumn 2018.

Columns for this issue touch on some of the themes underpinning the upcoming VAI Get Together 2018 (which will take place in IMMA on Monday 21 May), particularly the panel discussion, ‘Curating Ireland – New Ways of Working’. VAI NI Manager Rob Hilken outlines ‘New Spaces’, an upcoming exhibition and curatorial mentoring programme taking place in non-traditional venues across the Derry City and Strabane region. Jeanie Scott – the outgoing Director of a-n The Artists Information Company – discusses some of the issues currently facing visual artists in the UK.

A number of conference reports feature in this issue: Logan Sisley reports on the ‘Networked Curator’ event at the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Anne Mullee discusses the Art and Heritage seminar that took place in Kildare in February; and Pádraig Spillane reports from Berlin’s Transmediale Festival 2018.

As ever, we have details of the upcoming VAI Professional Development Programme, exhibition and public art roundup, critique section, news from the sector and current opportunities.

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MARY CONLON CATCHES UP WITH INTI GUERRERO, CURATOR OF THE 38TH EVA INTERNATIONAL, CURRENTLY SHOWING ACROSS MULTIPLE VENUES IN LIMERICK CITY.

Mary Conlon: In developing the 38th edition of EVA International, you have replaced the standard ‘monolithic’ biennial model with a more complex ecology of exhibitions. Can you explain this curatorial strategy?

Inti Guerrero: It is a proposal that corresponds to the simultaneous multiplicity of perception that audiences today have developed, alongside the advent of social media. In other words, in a biennial imagined as an ecology, people can navigate back and forth through entirely distinct bodies of work and different constellations of meaning, and yet not feel the need to force a single, dominant meta-curatorial framework upon every single artwork in the show. This isn’t to praise eclecticism for the sake of baroqueness, or to fall into cultural relativism of meaning, but to allow more freedom to the experience of an exhibition of this nature.

This strategy is also connected to the decision of not giving a title to the 38th EVA International. While researching EVA’s archive, I noticed that for EV+A in 1990, the curator (then called adjudicator), Saskia Bos, radically proposed giving a title to the exhibition for the very first time in its history. Bos’s show, titled ‘Climates of Thought’, told a story and proposed a concept – the ‘monolithic aspiration’, as she suggested in the exhibition catalogue. My intention of departing from this curatorial tradition of naming the exhibition, is primarily meant to emphasise the word ‘International’ in the biennial’s existing title. In our current state of nationalisms, hard borders, protectionism and a dismantling of the liberal belief in “never again”, the term ‘international’ suddenly carries an important weight. I believe this must be celebrated. Despite its modest scale and the fact that it does not operate from an ‘art capital’, EVA has been a forerunner in understanding the world through art within a transnational, transcultural and international dialogue since its foundation. In my view, this is what we must still celebrate.

MC: The thematic inquiry of the 38th EVA International is underpinned by Irish historical and art historical concerns. How did you balance national concerns with the international expectations of the biennial format?

IG: This edition sees a significant increase in artists from Ireland, compared with recent editions of EVA. Most notably, along with active Irish artists of our time – such as Sam Keogh, whose newly commissioned sci-fi work is currently showing at Cleeve’s Condensed Milk Factory, and Isabel Nolan, who presents new versions of her chandeliers of colour – we have also incorporated specific pieces by art historical figures, including works from the 1920s and 1930s by Seán Keating, Mainie Jellett and Eileen Gray. It is these artists and their works that underpin the narratives on hope, idealism and, ultimately, the deception of the nationhood project. The biennial seeks to curatorially reframe these early twentieth century artists within the context of present-day discussions. While researching Jellett, for example, it was remarkable to find that within her fauvic and cubist experimentation abstracting the icon of Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus, she paradoxically dedicated work to reproduction and even abortion. The ideological field of debate surrounding pregnancy is also found in the work of international artists, like Sanja Iveković.

Keating’s magnificent paintings depicting the construction of the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme have a more prominent representation. The main constellation of works at Limerick City Gallery of Art and Cleeve’s Condensed Milk Factory features practices addressing the subjects of electricity, light, power and related metaphors. The construction of power plants in itself is perhaps the most immediate and readable thread amongst works like Inji Aflatoun’s surrealist paintings and Malala Andrialadideazana’s new commission, featuring enlarged banknote collages of illustrations of dams and other major civic engineering projects used by many countries as state propaganda. Similarly, Aflatoun (b.1924–d.1989) was one of several artists and writers sent by the Egyptian government to create art devoted to the construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile – an icon of modernisation and Pan-Arab nationalism, inaugurated by Egyptian president Nasser and Russian statesman Khrushchev in 1964.

The open call for artists received around 2,500 applicants and the inclusion of artists coming through this mechanism either enriched the existing subjects described above, or catalysed entirely new and different thematic threads. This was particularly the case with Ian Wieczorek, an artist based in County Mayo, to whom I am grateful for his insightful approach to the subject of emigration, which simply cannot be ignored by a biennial in Western Europe today.

MC: The Shannon hydroelectric scheme was a bold undertaking for a newly formed Irish Free State, resulting in the largest engineering project in world at that time. How did your visits to the Ardnacrusha power plant in Clare and the archives at ESB Headquarters in Dublin become the curatorial inspiration for this year’s EVA?

IG: It was actually during my first visit to Limerick more than 18 months ago, when I came across Keating’s social realist painting, Night Candles are Burnt Out (1928–9), at The Hunt Museum. This first drew my attention to a subject that quickly became an obsession with these dam histories! I was well aware that there have been exhibitions and extensive scholarship devoted to Keating’s work (especially by art historian Dr Éimear O’Connor) and that there have also been recent in-depth documentaries and writings on Ardnacrusha. Therefore, I had to consider what a biennial could do differently, and how to propose connectivity across practices and artistic languages. One important element within the show is highlighting the ways in which people take the use of electricity for granted. It has become naturalised as part of our habitat, running our technologies and charging our electronic devices.

Electricity also plays a key biopolitical role in the production of capital, continuously extending working hours and stretching our notion of time. Yet, there isn’t widespread awareness of the fact that there are many populations around the world that still do not have electricity at home, no public lighting, nor that there are major metropolises like Lagos and Beirut with daily power cuts resulting from systemic corruption. This specific subject is addressed in the photographic work of Nigerian artist, Uchechukwu James-Iroha. Similarly, in Viriya Chotpanyavisut’s work, the silhouette of a fisherman and his impoverished reality in the darkness, contrasts with the glittering light of Bangkok’s neo-liberal cosmopolitan skyline.

My visit to the ESB HQ was instrumental in learning more about the complex narratives surrounding the construction of the hydroelectric dam and its aftermath. The ESB’s Rural Electrification Scheme was as important as the construction of the dam itself, because it concluded the construction of the national grid, completing the ‘electrification of the nation’. This was a revolutionary moment that placed Ireland ‘on track’ after decades of underdevelopment in non-metropolitan regions. A new film project by Adrian Duncan and Feargal Ward is grounded in these themes, exploring the massive importation of Scandinavian trees used for the electricity poles by the Irish government in the 1930s and 1940s.

MC: Following up on your earlier reference to the works of Mainie Jellet and Sanja Iveković, how has the upcoming referendum on the Eighth Amendment within the Irish constitution informed the biennial’s engagement with gender politics and the bureaucratic structures controlling the female body?

IG: Decriminalisation and legalisation of abortion is a major subject in many parts of the world. Ireland’s blind exception amongst the legislative abortion reforms across Western Europe suggests that perhaps the modernisation of the state is a continuously ongoing and unfinished process. There are still many struggles for the betterment of democracy, with this being one of them. Feminism, from its first wave onwards, has been fundamental to the improvement of an unequal and unjust citizenry. The Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment is therefore an important cultural production to bring into discussions at the 38th EVA International.

Mary Conlon is the founding director of Ormston House, Limerick.

Inti Guerrero is currently the Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art at Tate.

EVA International launched in 1977 as an artist-led exhibition in Limerick City. It has since grown to be Ireland’s biennial of contemporary art. The 38th EVA International continues across various venues in Limerick city until 8 July.

Image credits
Sanja Iveković, Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, 2001, gilded polyester, wood, inkjet print; installation view at the 38th EVA International; photograph by Deirdre Power, courtesy the artist and EVA.
Sam Keogh, Integrated Mystery House, 2018, performance and mixed media installation; performance at the 38th EVA International 2018; photograph by Deirdre Power; courtesy the artist and EVA International
Isabel Nolan, It Was Hot, Dense And Smooth, 2018; The Light Poured Out Of You, 2017; and Partial Eclipse (Above), 2017–2018, mild steel, paint, fabric and dye; image courtesy the artist, Kerlin Gallery and EVA International

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BRENDA MOORE-MCCANN OUTLINES THE EXHIBITIONS AND PROJECTS TAKING PLACE NATIONWIDE TO CELEBRATE THE DIVERSE ARTISTIC CAREER OF BRIAN O’DOHERTY.

Few would disagree that Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland is one of the most distinguished and significant artists of his generation to come out of Ireland onto the international stage in the last fifty years. Born in Ballaghaderreen, County Roscommon, his influence is felt on both sides of the Atlantic since his (voluntary) exile to New York in 1957. His extraordinary career, which spans many disciplines and uses different heteronyms¹, has been puzzling to some and inspirational to others. As a pioneering conceptual artist, he produced such seminal works as the first conceptual portrait, Portrait of Duchamp (1966), as well as a double issue of the ground-breaking experimental magazine, Aspen 5+6 (1967), often cited as the first exhibition of conceptual art to dispense with the gallery. O’Doherty’s highly-influential series of critical essays, ‘Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space’ – first published in Artforum in 1976 – have been widely translated, forming an essential part of every art college library for decades. These essays were pivotal to the late twentieth century’s institutional critique for their exposure of the heretofore hidden economic, sociological and ideological factors underlying the exhibition and spectatorship of modernist art.

In November 1972, as an emigrant’s response to Bloody Sunday in Derry the previous January, O’Doherty changed his artist name to Patrick Ireland at the ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’ in Dublin. Declaring he would hold the name until the British military presence was removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens restored their human rights, this became, chronologically, the first work of performance art in Ireland. After thirty-six years and with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, an effigy of Patrick Ireland (bearing a mask of O’Doherty’s face) was ritualistically buried following a three-day wake, in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in 2008. The headstone reads: “Patrick Ireland 1972–2008” with the words “ONE, HERE, NOW” beneath, transcribed into the archaic Celtic language of Ogham.

This Ogham language, which he learned as a schoolboy in Ireland, was introduced to the world of conceptual art by O’Doherty in 1967 in a unique formulation that juxtaposed conceptualism, serialism and language. Remarkably, the structure of Ogham coincided with a growing interest in serialism at the time among conceptual artists like O’Doherty, Mel Bochner and Sol Lewitt. In Ogham, vowels and consonants are reduced to lines at intervals above, below and across a horizontal or vertical, similar to the arrangement of sets of notes in serial music. This was O’Doherty’s Rosetta Stone, which, over six decades, has produced an extraordinary array of Ogham drawings, sculptures, wall paintings, easel paintings and plays called ‘Structural Plays’. The artist George Segal once referred to O’Doherty/Ireland’s work as “the greatest oeuvre of drawings by any post-war American artist.” In these works, his verbal culture was reduced to single words with ontological undertones – ONE, HERE, NOW or, even further, to the vowels alone.

As Patrick Ireland, O’Doherty’s linear drawings based on the language of Ogham, were taken into three-dimensional space with his signature series of ‘Rope Drawing’ installations, of which there have been 127 to date. Using space, colour and line, the Rope Drawings deftly overcame many of the criticisms so cogently outlined in Inside the White Cube. Crossing yet another boundary within the arts, O’Doherty became a novelist, his first novel, The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P, winning the Sagittarius Prize in 1993 and his second, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000.

This year will be a significant one for this polymath artist, critic, medical doctor, writer, teacher, arts administrator and filmmaker as he reaches his ninetieth year, with long-overdue celebrations of his distinguished career taking place across Ireland. Events began in April at the Sirius Art Centre in the port town of Cobh in Cork, when a series of recently-restored wall paintings, titled ‘One, Here, Now: The Ogham Cycle’, was unveiled. Painted by Patrick Ireland when he was artist-in-residence at Sirius in 1996, they were subsequently donated by the artist to the Irish State, a gift accepted by President Mary Robinson. The paintings have lain hidden behind wallpaper in the central luminous space at Sirius until an ambitious restoration project was initiated by Sirius Director, Miranda Driscoll. Originally commissioned by Peter Murray, then Director of the Crawford Gallery, the wall paintings address Irish historical experience through language (Ogham, Irish and English). It is the richest and largest Ogham wall painting of the artist’s lengthy career, and one of the few permanent works in existence (two others are in Italy). The launch of this important restoration work coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of Sirius itself, and is accompanied by a year-long programme of talks, specially-commissioned artworks, musical compositions, dance pieces and performances responding to the work.²

A highlight at the opening was a public conversation between Brian O’Doherty and Alanna Heiss, founder of the PS1 gallery in New York (now MoMA PS1), on Saturday 21 April at the Sirius Art Centre. The same evening One, Here, Now: A Sonic Theatre – featuring newly commissioned music by Ann Cleare, developed in response to The Ogham Cycle – was performed at Sirius. The Glucksman at University College Cork is also showing work by O’Doherty/Ireland, as part of the exhibition, ‘Double Take: Collection and Context’, which opened the same weekend. In addition, the theatre company, Gare St Lazare Ireland, presented Here All Night at the Everyman Theatre on Monday 23 April, a production that includes texts, songs, music and poems appearing in Samuel Beckett’s work. Visual elements taken from O’Doherty’s installation, Hello, Sam Redux – which was originally exhibited in Dublin Contemporary at the National Gallery in 2011 – have been successfully incorporated into the work since 2016.

Other events in Cork include a celebration of the artist’s film career with a three-month screening series, titled ‘There is no thing here but much else’, that continues until 27 May at Crawford Art Gallery. Included is O’Doherty’s film Hopper’s Silence (1981), which won the Grand Prix at the Montreal International Festival of Films on Art in 1982. Also showing is the film Inverted Pyramid for Cyclops, in which O’Doherty playfully critiques Patrick Ireland’s Rope Drawing #94 installation at the Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, in 1990.

Sé Merry Doyle’s film, Lament for Patrick Ireland (2008), was also screened on 6 April following a talk, titled ‘Re-Introducing Patrick Ireland: Selves, Semantics, Site-Lines’, by Christina Kennedy, Head of Collections at IMMA. In tandem with the tenth anniversary of the Burial of Patrick Ireland (1972–2008) – the subject of Merry Doyle’s film – an exhibition curated by Christina Kennedy opened at IMMA on 26 April, entitled ‘Brian O’Doherty: Language and Space’. The exhibition, which continues until 16 September, was developed in partnership with Stoney Road Press, with whom O’Doherty has had a long collaboration. Prominent among the works on display are drawings and works on paper, from the Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1966/2012) to the Rotating Vowels (2017) series. It is the latest evocation of a career-long interest in language, and the Ogham vowels in particular. The most recent series of Doherty’s prints with Stoney Road Press are the Structural Plays (1967–70/2018), performative language plays that were unique to the conceptual period. Also on display is video documentation of the piece, Vowel Grid (1970), performed in 1998 in An Grianán Fort, County Donegal. The aforementioned multimedia work, Aspen 5+6, put together by O’Doherty in 1967 as a “conceptual issue”, is also included in the show at IMMA.

The New Yorker magazine once described O’Doherty as “one of New York’s most treasured artist/intellectuals”. It looks as if he is about to reclaimed by his own country in what is already proving to be a fittingly broad and exciting programme of events that will extend into 2019: ‘There is no thing here but much else’, continues at Crawford Art Gallery until 27 May; ‘Double Take: Collection and Context’ runs at the Glucksman until 8 July; ‘Brian O’Doherty: Language and Space’ is showing at IMMA until 16 September; ‘ONE HERE NOW: The Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland Project’ will be on view at Sirius Arts Centre until April 2019.

Brenda Moore-McCann is the author of O’Doherty’s first monograph, Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Between Categories, published in 2009. She is currently editing a book of selected letters from O’Doherty from the 1970s to the present day, which will be published by Smith and Brown, London, in September 2018.

Notes
¹A heteronym differs from a pseudonym by creating a living biography attached to the assumed name or creative persona. Sigmund Bode, Mary Josephson and William Maginn are other heteronyms of Brian O’Doherty, first revealed in 2002 in the photographic multiple portrait, Five Identities.
² siriusartcentre.ie/one-here-now

Image credits
Brian O’Doherty, Burial of Patrick Ireland, 2008, Irish Museum of Modern Art; photograph © Fionn McCann Photography
Brian O’Doherty, Rotating Vowels v, 2014, etching, 92 x 73.5 cm; edition of 40; image courtesy the artist and Stoney Road Press
Conservator Don Knox at work on the restoration of Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland’s One, Here, Now, Sirius Arts Centre; image by Miranda Driscoll, Sirius Arts Centre

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PÁDRAIG SPILLANE REPORTS FROM BERLIN’S TRANSMEDIALE FESTIVAL 2018

Transmediale Festival 2018: ‘Face Value’ took place from 31 January – 4 February at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Bearing name changes over its thirty years, transmediale continues to examine and advance understandings regarding how societies absorb technologies. This 31st edition employed the familiar blunt phrase ‘face value’ – the apparent or supposed worth of something – to position multifaceted assessments of relationships with technologies and the influence they have on current cultural and political trajectories.

As stated on the festival’s website, transmediale 2018 aimed to “take stock of current affairs, to recognise things for what they are before saying how they could be different”.¹ The resolve was to look past the surface of the contemporary moment; to look at the abundance of players, agents and processes working to be recognised within the ‘face value’ of things; to examine where competing gains or attributes are networked and used for further advantage. Key questions asked by the festival included: Why might we think of truth as sitting on the surface of accepted things? Is this a naive presumption? Is truth always readily available? What is happening in contemporaneous destabilising shifts in the media?²

On the marks of coins throughout history, what happens at face value is not so much about truth, but an indication of the power struggles that wish to run through bodies and minds. As queried by Jussi Parikka in his opening remarks for the ‘Biased Futures’ panel discussion, what ideologies and rationales have been and are being further incorporated into life infrastructures? What ‘big data’ provocations need to be tackled? How is our habitual technology structured and used for data mining and data modeling predictions? What are the motivations and the possible consequences? It is worth noting that at the time of writing, Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based political consulting firm, is embroiled in an unfolding news story regarding the alleged harvesting of personal data from over 50 million Facebook users, with the aim of influencing the outcome of the 2016 American presidential election.

The strands of the festival – which included an exhibition, conference and video programme, as well as an accompanying journal and online archive – cast illuminations on different and recurrent subjects across the four-day-event and beyond. Over the past few years, we have been made aware of such issues, almost on a daily basis, including: the collection and financialisation of personal data through online devices; the regeneration and engineering of populism; and the disclosed processes that have shared in creating this present moment of unease, distrust and antagonism. On the first full day, there was a sense of deflation within the festival’s spaces, weighed down by despondency to these times and perhaps our own unrestrained involvement with ‘friendly power’.³ What was unmistakable was a searching for modes of resistance. I may be a self-projectionist here (as that is why I went) but judging by subsequent media reviews of the festival, there was a collective desire to find ways to counter the mood and shifts of the past few years.

The exhibition programme ‘Territories of Complicity’ took “the free port as the referential starting point to explore how covert systems, technological infrastructures, and zones of exception shape our economic, socio-political realities.”⁴ It was secluded within a rectangular space, baring uniform black floors and walls, akin to stage flooring. This was a temporary adaptation, with a central corridor giving tight spaces for the installation of artworks either side. The exhibition space itself took on a permutation of containment – a visualisation with various contentions.

Zach Blas’s ongoing project, ‘Contra-Internet’ (2014–18), was shown as part of the exhibition, addressing the impacts the internet continues to stimulate. Within the installation – comprising various elements and a projection of his film, Jubilee 2033 (2017) – was a one-off book titled The End of the Internet (As We know It) by Nootropix, the film’s contra-sexual, prophetic main character. As stated in the opening pages: “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of the late internet; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations”. It is an interesting thought experiment that as we hear more of the human impact on the world, we can imagine the world gone, but not this system that brings us information. This suggests that the impact and connections of the dominion of the internet on our lives may feel more real or linked to us than our relationships with the physical world. It also shows that what controls the internet can influence perspectives on contemporary reality. The scope of Blas’s work is to set up other possibilities regarding the internet, outside of something closed and deterministic that we have today, which is removed from possible historical queer, feminist and other emancipatory modes of online culture.

Focusing on the rare earth element, europium, Lisa Rave’s film, Europium (2014), confronted “the transformation of a raw material into a monetary value”. This metallic element is extracted from the Bismarck Sea in Papua New Guinea. The florescent properties of europium are harnessed to create luminous flat screens for mobile phones, computer monitors and other pervasive displays. Europium operates by interlinking various types of imagery through anthropology photographs, commercial mock-ups and consumer advertising, creating a timeline that spans the nineteenth-century colonisation of Papua New Guinea, to the present-day sale of technological devices. Rave’s sophisticated connections between historical power struggles, spiritism, currency, material hoarding and cultural taboos, seemed effortlessness. The film successfully highlights the power relations occurring in plain sight, with regard to the devices we hold in our hands, as well as the constant upgrading of our everyday infrastructures.

These ideas link with various other aspects of the transmediale programme, most explicitly with the keynote delivered by Françoise Vergès, entitled the ‘Politics of Forgetfulness’. Vergès asserted that we are conditioned to forget, in order to maintain current and future narratives of control. She spoke about the concealment of past slavery and bonded labour, and how these were the building blocks of the modern capitalist age. Referencing ‘Black Geographies’⁵, Vergès asserted that in order to develop fresh theories and ways of resistance, we need new histories that will allow us to reconsider space-making and temporal ways of being with each other, outside of current economic and political systems.

The ‘guest presentation’, ‘A Becoming Resemblance’ by Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea Manning, was salient for this year’s festival. It comprised two works, Probably Chelsea (2016) and Spurious Memories (2007) and was presented in a light-filled space. Probably Chelsea was created using Manning’s DNA material – collected through consensual cheek swab samples and hair clippings during her incarceration – that was posted to Dewey-Hagborg. Using this shared biological information, the artist generated conceivable portraits via genomic identity construction technologies and 3D printing.

At first sight, the resulting installation was unsettling; thirty detached faces with open-eyed static gazes were suspended roughly at head-height. However, an initial unease gave way to wonder through 360-degree examination of the works. These heads (with the possibility of further multitudes) subvert the potential biases within such seemingly dystopian DNA profiling technologies, by playing with the very parameters and template biases in such technologies. From such processes, moments of commonality can be achieved, using genetics to show a level of mutuality that should be reinforced in these times. During a panel discussion called ‘Calculating Life’, Dewey-Hagborg spoke of her collaboration with Manning. She emphasised the installation as having ‘molecular solidarity’, aspiring to what Manning calls a “coalition”⁶ across identity categories, aimed at countering the animosity that such categorisation frequently produces. A basic techno-hack produced a moment of possibility, a hopeful proposal that was warmly welcomed in this year’s edition, where the overriding feeling was the recognition of deficit and a teasing apart of why this may be the case.

Pádraig Spillane is a Cork-based visual artist who works with photography, collage and assemblage.

Notes:
¹2018.transmediale.de/program/text/face-value
²The surface is a site of play and illusion, not where truth and falsity exist, as described by Faisal Devji in his essay, ‘Life on the Surface’, for the festival publication, archived at transmediale.de/content/life-on-the-surface
³Byung-Chul Han ‘Smart Power’, Psychopolitics (Croydon: Verso, 2017) p.13-15.
⁴2018.transmediale.de/program/text/territories-of-complicity
⁵‘Black Geographies’ offer ways of reexamining black lives and experiences. It considers how human relations are structured through spatial organisation, identity categories, exclusion, disparities and their opposition.
⁶See Chelsea Manning’s interview in PAPER Magazine: papermag.com/we-are-at-the-very-beginning-of-a-new-epoch-chelsea-manning-on-the-lux-1427637348.html

Image credits:
Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea Manning, A Becoming Resemblance (installation view); photograph Adam Berry, transmediale
Zach Blas, Contra-Internet, 2014–2018; photograph by Luca Girardini, transmediale
Françoise Vergès delivering her keynote ‘Politics of Forgetfulness’; photograph by Adam Berry, transmediale

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JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS ALISON PILKINGTON ABOUT THE METHODS AND INFLUENCES UNDERPINNING HER CURRENT BODY OF WORK.

JL: Your paintings seem to combine abstract, diagrammatic and figurative approaches. Are you conscious of having a particular aesthetic in mind, when you embark on a painting?

AP: My aesthetic approach or painting style has evolved a lot over the last ten years or so, particularly since embarking on a practice-based PhD at NCAD, which I started in 2009 and completed in 2015. During this time, I made quite a deliberate break from gestural abstract painting. I think I felt the need to free myself up from a particular style of painting. It is ironic that gestural abstract painting – which is considered such a free and intuitive way of handling paint – was becoming restrictive and stifling for me. By making these deliberate changes, I felt I could explore the medium of painting as an active research process that could have a range of possible outcomes. I wanted to concentrate more on personal narratives and to explore how I might express these narratives through the medium of painting. I also wanted to explore figurative possibilities within the work. This was when I started exploring collage and maquettes as creative prompters for paintings. The work of certain artists, who paved the way for more fluid approaches to painting, have been greatly influential for me in this respect. These include German artist, Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997), and more contemporary artists such as New York-based abstract painter, Charline Von Heyl, and American painter, Amy Sillman.

JL: Can you briefly outline your PhD inquiry and how this research may have altered your approaches to painting?

AP: As anyone who has undertaken a doctorate will tell you, PhD research is a durational and complex journey. For me, there was a lot of discovery about the ‘why’ more than the ‘how’ of painting – a reflective process that included a rigorous exploration of the medium’s relevance or validity as a research method. There are other avenues related to the research that I would now like to explore further, such as framing the creative process as a radical space for artistic agency – something that relates to my new body of work.

JL: Perhaps you could outline some of your research methods?

AP: My work tends to start with sketches, drawings and watercolour studies. I keep notes, thoughts and ideas in my journals. I love the freedom of drawing in sketchbooks and journals, and I tend to have two or three on the go at any one time. I try to make connections between what I am thinking and writing about in my journals and the images that emerge in the notebooks. Ultimately, the paintings are an extension of this investigative process – an approach that helps me to retain a looseness within my paintings. Rather than making direct painterly copies of my maquettes and collages, I use them as references that can be transformed through the process of painting.

JL: Can you outline some of your art historical influences?

AP: References to painting from different periods of art history frequently come through in my work. Sometimes these associations are made unconsciously, and it is only at some later stage that I might recognise their significance. However, there are some explicit and recurrent references to individual paintings that I consistently find compelling, curious or strange, both in terms of the artist’s approaches to composition, or to the work’s narrative content. A painting by Pietro Longhi, titled Clara the Rhinoceros (1751), has interested me for some time. I have made several paintings that express my fascination with its strangeness and my preoccupation with interpreting its meaning. This was something that I explored at length during my PhD research. Magritte is another important touchstone for my work, based on the artist’s life-long exploration of painting as something ‘inherently mysterious’. Magritte’s oeuvre rendered everyday objects within strange, unfamiliar or uncanny scenes and this is something that has frequently inspired me. I also love paintings from the early seventeenth-century Baroque period, including work by Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens and Poussin. I try to recreate a bit of their drama in my paintings, through the use of strong light sources, experimentations with scale, and through the suggestion of underlying narratives.

JL: Much of your work displays a preoccupation with depth of field. Can you discuss your paintings in terms of trompe l’oeil and your treatment of surfaces?

AP: I think this grew out of my preoccupation with the specifics of the medium of painting. Such inquiries included an exploration of how the introduction of light often creates shadows and highlights. I’m also interested in how scale and composition can create visual tension within a painting or across an entire body of work. These are the more formal elements of composition, but I try to consider them in tandem with the narratives that that I am developing in the paintings. Making paper maquettes and collages using ‘flat colour’ challenged me to consider the types of brushwork and paint coverage that create impressions of ‘flatness’. Cutting through the paper and folding it back to reveal another layer of colour underneath works on a formal level, while also having symbolic meaning relating to the self – to concealing and revealing parts of the self. It is me attempting to give shape to these thoughts. Much of this exploration started with the maquettes and thinking about the three-dimensional aspect of an object in space. Flaps, holes, tentacles and shadows occurring within these sculptural objects gradually evolved and were transformed through painting.

JL: In your current solo exhibition, ‘How We Roam’, there is a sense that the characters in your paintings are embarking on curious or speculative journeys. Is this a metaphor for the creative process?

AP: It is, yes. There are references to classical portraiture, landscape paintings and the sublime in art history. Many of my paintings depict figures in the wilderness, perhaps conquering the terrain, or having reached the summit of a mountain, as in the painting Wanderer. For me, the idea of a figure roaming the wilderness is undoubtedly a metaphor for the creative process, which can push an artist out of their comfort-zone. It can make us feel vulnerable, as we test out new things, but ultimately the process rewards and re-energises the human spirit. This simple motif is developed across this new series of paintings, which I hope prompts the viewer to ask questions about the work and to be curious.

Alison Pilkington is an artist who lives and works in Dublin. ‘How We Roam’ is currently showing at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon until 2 June and will subsequently be presented at the Ashford Gallery, RHA in September 2018.
alisonpilkington.com

Image credits:
View of Alison Pilkington’s notebook sketches
Alison Pilkington, Wanderer, 2017, oil on canvas
Alison Pilkington, Nature, 2017, oil on canvas

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Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre
3 March – 10 April 2018

Featuring: David Quinn and Joanna Kidney

David Quinn’s show at Uillinn consists of two artworks, Uillinn Series One to Nineteen (2018) and Zero (2018). The former consists of 19 small abstract works on paper and wood, composed of gesso, oil-based pencil and oil bar. All are uniform in size and are hung at eyelevel on two opposing walls of the James O’Driscoll Gallery. Their location is not best served by the open plan setting, as sound from the reception area spills into the gallery. This highlights a common dilemma within contemporary publicly-funded art galleries: demands for public accessibility, interactivity and inclusiveness can often lead to the art itself seeming like an afterthought.

Quinn makes work that is in dialogue with the history of modernist painting. The end of painting was announced with the birth of photography and the era of mass-produced images and commodities. Quinn’s work engages with this dialogue at the ‘end of the end of art’. It is preoccupied with the self-evident fact of its own materiality. Certain repeated elements and gestures unify the series – signs of brush strokes, the grid (a recurring painterly parameter) and mark-making (resembling stitching) that is scoured into the surface. Several works appear to have a top layer of gesso that has then been etched with various patterns. From a distance, colours have a rusty quality, but close up, pinks, oranges and yellows emerge.

Slightly larger and in a horizontal format, Zero is a monochromatic acrylic painting on plywood, with small circles indented into the surface. It has a translucent quality and is suggestive of snowscapes. The painting alludes to various art historical monochromes, from Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), to Ad Reinhardt’s ‘black’ or ‘ultimate’ paintings of the 1960s, of which he claimed: “I’m merely making the last paintings which anyone can make.”¹ The inclusion of depth in the dimensions listed in the gallery handout expresses ambiguity around the object’s classification – is it a painting or a sculpture?

The self-reflexive aspect of Quinn’s work is shared by Joanna Kidney’s installation, Metamurmuration, an element that is explicitly signalled by the title. It is a murmuration meditating on a murmuration. A murmuration is a swarm – most often the amazing natural spectacles associated with starlings – a flocking, if you like, revealing the pun that flocking also denotes a kind of wallpaper, originally designed to simulate velvet cutouts on tapestries and wall hangings. Kidney’s threaded felt pieces trail the wall from ceiling to floor just outside the James O’ Driscoll Gallery, where they have to compete with an information stand, light switches and fire safety signage. As I moved from the corridor into the open space of Gallery II, Metamurmuration produced a momentary feeling of wonder. Seen from a distance against the back wall of the gallery, the installation appeared like a very large and beautiful abstract painting. The installation announces time spent making; many hands were involved in the assemblage of over 100,000 felt pieces. I initially perceived the felt as black, given associations with black swarms of birds, but in the light-filled upper gallery I saw that the materials were various shades of ochre, green, grey, lilac and red. Up close, the pieces move. This is not apparent from a distance, so perhaps my breath, my presence, caused the slight movement.

Like Quinn’s objects of vacillating status – paintings that must withstand disappearing into design – Kidney’s installation also has to fight for its status within the gallery, though it does benefit from being situated in a slightly quieter space, where it is easier to spend time with the work. Both artists are concerned with scale, evident in their attempts to create site-specific installations from the arrangement of smaller parts. In some instances, the work is overwhelmed by the quotidian goings-on of the gallery, however at other times, it manages to stand its ground as art.

Catherine Harty is a member of the Cork Artists Collective and a director of The Guesthouse Project.

Notes:
¹Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism, (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004) p398.

Image credits:
Joanna Kidney, Metamurmuration (detail), 2015–2018, felt and microfilament, dimensions variable; photograph by Tomasz Madajczak
David Quinn’s paintings, installation view; photography by Tomasz Madajczak

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RHA Ashford Gallery, Dublin
15 March – 22 April 2018

I moved house recently and, in the process, became acutely aware of our perceived ownership of spaces. As I emptied one house of our family’s possessions, our hold on it began to drain. And as we began to fill the new house, our presence began forcing out the previous occupants. Before I turned the key of our old house for the last time, I was left in a space emptied of our things but was also conscious that some of our memories and traces would remain. This often-indiscernible line that exists between physical structures and our relationship to them is explored by Dorothy Smith in her show, ‘Land Marks’, at the RHA’s Ashford Gallery.

Smith displays 21 drawings, all from the same body of work, but displayed in the gallery as two distinct subgroups, according to scale and technique. Ten larger pieces take on more mechanical and architectural qualities, with the artist using repetitive but varying pencil lines. Eleven smaller square pieces – given the prefix ‘Other Landscapes’ – see the artist adopt a more freeform approach. Smith’s choice of pencil anchors the work to architectural drawing. Devoid of people, skies and other non-architectural elements; civil engineering and architecture are the only visual languages, with road signs and barriers assuming the roles of textual signifiers. In these pieces, Smith confidently includes only what she wants to, leaving large sections of the paper blank. The drawings occupy the middle-horizon, leaving the edges free for contemplation, as she isolates structures from their context.

This sense of architectural drawing is most prominent in the block of social housing and terraced housing presented in Encounter and The Gardens respectively. In each drawing, trees are depicted as 2D objects, akin to an architectural elevation. The looser lines used help to inject a level of fiction into the work’s narratives. These pieces also help highlight the conflicts between private and public spaces, and how this impacts on the management of space – the block housing is depicted in the process of closure.

In ‘Other Landscapes’, we are presented with a contrasting approach. Here, Smith retains the entire surroundings of her items of intrigue, thus maintaining a faithful link to their context. As a result – and despite the ongoing lack of figurative representation – we observe a more humanly presence through the depiction of objects like postboxes, a tent and a sports stadium. The irony of describing scenes like these as more humanly (when compared to the larger manmade landscapes) is palpable. At times these 11 smaller works seem to act as follies to the larger works, existing in the show as satellite objects, rather than as independent entities. And while the intimacy of the Ashford Gallery helps gel the various works together, a larger space would have allowed them to breathe more.

In the days after visiting Smith’s work, I experienced a heightened awareness of the changes occurring within my urban locality. Looking at the new Mary’s Mansions development on Sean MacDermott Street Lower – and how this post-war social housing is now being partly demolished for refurbishment – I see echoes of two of Smith’s drawings: the aforementioned Encounter, as well as Capital – More is Easy, which features the new Capital Dock construction on the quays. In this artwork, Smith shows the building sprouting up, scaffolding and supports in place, with the injection of capital fuelling its growth.

Where we live is a huge part of our fabric. In recent decades, an increasing number of us are occupying non-rural landscapes, with the most recent census indicating that nearly two-thirds of Irish people now live in urban areas. These spaces are in constant states of construction and deconstruction as they go through their life-cycles. Urban landmarks evoke a sense of identity and, at times, a sense of permanence that can be misplaced. With this exhibition, Smith draws on these often-unconscious observations of the spaces we inhabit, analytically investigating them for us to enjoy.

Aidan Kelly Murphy is a writer and photographer based in Dublin, and Arts Editor of The Thin Air.

Image credit:
Dorothy Smith, Encounter, 2017, pencil on paper, 102 x 65 cm; image courtesy of the artist

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Gallery of Modern Art, Waterford
8 – 26 March 2018

The French novelist, Gustave Flaubert, an exponent of literary realism, once stated that “the artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere, but never see him”¹. Anthony Mackey’s first solo exhibition accomplished this with consummate skill. His site-specific installation for GOMA employed various mediums and artistic methods to explore social issues of the marginalised community in which he lives and works. The mixed media installation – comprising drawings, printmaking and video – was presented across two gallery spaces, with local people being an integral element. No titles, details, pricelist, or descriptions of the artworks were offered; a wall text stating the artist’s name and the exhibition title provided the only acknowledgment of Mackey in the entire gallery.

The first room contained four framed pencil sketches of men, composed through dark, bold and loosely-formed marks. Written under each portrait was the sitter’s first name, as well as the date and time. Time is a measurement of value, as there is only so much of it available to us, thus Mackey established a sense of worth for his subjects. Occupying the full length and height of two large walls were mosaic-style wooden tiles, in varying hues of blue, red and yellow. Screen-printed onto the tiles were faces and local buildings, including a young girl, a Garda, an adolescent boy and a corner shop, portrayed with a blueprint quality. The surfaces of these tiles were partially peeled back, rendering the wood fibres visible and offering a derelict quality.

In the second room, four videos were installed on the wall, with more tiles forming frames around them. Taking up headphones, one heard a thickly accented voice, while watching footage of an anonymous hand drawing lines on paper. As a face was being formed – based on the portraits presented in the first space – the viewer heard a voiceover relaying the subject’s story. Tales of addiction, disillusion, unemployment and crime unfolded, highlighting the myriad issues often facing marginalised communities. Yet within these stories, there was shrewd commentary on various issues, such as: the manipulation of cheap labour by employment schemes; manual skills being lost to automation; and the economic impact of unemployment within communities. These seemed like the collected narratives of a culture that has developed various survival skills to exist within a system that does little to acknowledge social inequality; they offered forthright, sincere and occasionally humorous reflections on the subcultures that pulse through this nation. 

The jewels of this exhibition were two drawings made on roughly torn paper that were pinned to the wall, as if floating in mid-air. The first depicted a male’s face and upper torso, while the second was a full-length sketch of two men. With no glass or frame creating a barrier between the viewer and the artwork, Mackey’s exquisite draughtsmanship was highly evident. These drawings contained no textual information about the subject, yet the range of emotion was so superbly executed that one felt as if their very souls would pour forth from the paper and drip down around one’s feet. They represented the dual ‘perspectives’ present within Mackey’s work – those of the socially-excluded or disenfranchised, and that of the strength in community, developed through familiarity, camaraderie and shared hardship.

There are similarities between Mackey’s drawings and the work of American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975). Each artist captures people in their everyday environments, chronicling how government policies affect communities within a given period or nation. Like Evans, Mackey works in a sphere reticent with notions of realism and the spectator’s role. While Evans conveyed the character of communities by photographing architecture, billboards and shop displays, Mackey brings forth internal and emotional qualities through his skilful drawing. Using the poetic potential of plain fact, Mackey has created a body of work in which the artist’s role is deeply felt.

Susan Edwards is a writer based in County Wexford with a graduate degree in contemporary art theory.

Notes
¹Gustave Flaubert, ‘Letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie’, 18 March 1857, in Francis Steegmuller, trans. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830 – 1857, Vol. 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1981) p. 230.

Image credit:
Anthony Mackey, Conversations with Cuddo (Drawing), 2018, graphite on paper

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The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon
10 February – 31 March 2018

Featuring: Alice Hanratty, Kian Benson Bailes and Eleanor McCaughey

‘Like Me’ is a show which demonstrates the continued relevance and vitality of painting and drawing. Amongst other things, the three artists explore relationships between two-dimensional artworks and architectural space, while art of the past acts as a source of joy and inspiration, rather than as a ‘dead hand’, stifling creativity.

Alice Hanratty’s newly-commissioned work, Procession, is a frieze of head-and-shoulder profile portraits, based on Cinquecento paintings, such as Piero della Francesca’s The Duke and Duchess of Urbino (1467–72). The works, which form a continuous frieze around The Dock’s central hall, are also exhibited as individual works on paper in Gallery One. The transformation of the loosely painted, easel-size paintings into a large-scale architectural intervention changes the character of both the artworks and the architectural setting, allowing viewers to consider the previous functions of the former courthouse building that The Dock occupies, and the gentler flow of people that now circulates.

Hanratty’s frieze is reminiscent of Benozzo Gozzoli’s Procession of the Magi in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence (1459 – 60); however, the figures we see depicted here don’t seem like nobles and kings, but everyday people. Also on display is Hanratty’s dexterous use of paint. The brushstrokes tread a delicate line: they describe the motif, while at the same time operating quite independently of it. The pencil line that carries the descriptive structure of the figures is succinct and right. There is a sense of control over the medium, allied with a sense of exhilaration in the painting process. The way the figures are quoted and reused within the frieze brings to mind the appropriated imagery of Pop Art. However, the figures here are not merely a prop to hang virtuoso painting onto. Freed from their role as participants within a narrative, we are asked to ponder their function: perhaps they are the artist’s much-loved companions or guides?

Entering Gallery Two, one encounters a giant billboard-sized work by Kian Benson Bailes. The work is angled against the wall, dazzling the viewer with its sheer scale before one can grapple with its dense imagery. The digitally-generated drawing is made up of hard-to-define architectural forms, natural elements and fragments, with the format and compositional structure resembling a landscape painting. In the foreground are monochrome forms, reminiscent of bleached coral reef. In the middle ground, a black and white photographic section depicts a forest, while the space at the top of the composition is scattered with heavy geometric clouds.

This structure is fragmentary, shifting and elusive, creating spatial disorientation reminiscent of Pop Art’s collaged surfaces, which conflated the upbeat messages of advertising whilst questioning society’s acceptance of consumerism. Benson Bailes’s work refers to the idealised spaces of AutoCAD design, a seductive platform used to sell us everything from designer kitchens to housing estates, while referencing the immersive and addictive parallel world of video games. On the reverse of the huge billboard is a small video monitor, showing the looped digital video, Untitled 2, which consists of tilting and shifting montage-imagery. This small, screen-sized interface provides a counterpoint to the huge billboard, playing with the idea of scale. In this piece, and in two accompanying works on paper, architectural references allude to plans for ideal spaces, as fragmentary and partial figures appear and disappear.

In the same space, Eleanor McCaughey’s paintings are shown in a partitioned area with brightly-coloured, patterned and fleece-covered walls. The installation calls to mind the full-on aesthetic of the Postmodern design collective, the Memphis Group, while evoking the visual language of MTV and early music videos. The effect is a powerful statement, highlighting a process of art historical appropriation that permeates the entire show, creating a rich visual experience.

The paintings themselves play with conventions of portraiture and still life. They offer naturalistic renderings of constructions that the artist has made with detritus, molded together and often bathed in oozing masses of paint. They reference classical portrait busts but resemble traditional still life paintings, in their lighting and deadpan handling. Like Baroque fantasies, they play with the viewers’ expectations of portraiture and teasingly question our credulity in front of these seemingly flat images. The synthetic colours and materials used to make the original sculptures are entirely modern, while their abject nature as objects arguably occupies an intensely critical position in relation to contemporary visual culture. However, the framing of the paintings within their own joyfully kitsch mini-gallery mitigates against any such straightforward readings. As well as inviting us to think about how we represent ourselves, and how we view each other, McCaughey, like the other artists exhibiting in ‘Like Me’, demonstrates a commitment to giving the viewer a richly visual experience.

Andy Parsons is an artist based in Sligo. He is the founder of Floating World Artist Books.

Image credits:
Kian Benson Bailes, Untitled 1, digitial print, 335 x 488 cm; image courtesy of the artist and The Dock; photograph by Anna Leask
Alice Hanratty, Procession; image courtesy of the artist and The Dock; photograph by Anna Leask
Eleanor McCaughy, installation view; image courtesy of the artist and The Dock; photograph by Steven Maybury

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The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin
1 – 24 February 2018

The title of Shane Berkery’s latest exhibition imparts little more than an implied focus on recent work, spotlighting where he is in his developing career through paintings that reflect his influences and interests. Dublin-based with Irish-Japanese parentage, Berkery eschews an overtly conceptual approach to his practice, and so may also be commenting on what contemporary art can be. The 11 canvases fall into two broad groupings, one with images of young ‘contemporary’ subjects, the other drawing on black and white photos relating to his Japanese heritage. Dating from the 1950s and ‘60s, these are characterised by informal poses and the clothing of the era, including kimonos and other traditional attire.

As such, the showing typifies a body of work concerned with the human figure, within which variations in style, content and scale lend a measure of unpredictability. Berkery transforms his source material through decisions made while painting about what to portray, modify or withhold. His signature approach uses non-naturalistic sepia tones, harmonious pastels and edgy pinks, yellows and blues. This distinctive repertoire unifies the work (despite its relative diversity) as does photo-real illusionism, variously mitigated by background-foreground interplays, painterly stripes, splotches, ellipses and lightly-stained, visible canvas weave.

Figure in the Dark introduces the Japanese strand. While Berkery often deploys monochrome within oscillating colour relationships, this study, unusually, features only tones of ‘black’ with burnt sienna accents. It captures a life-size male, mid-motion and mid-expression, his unstable stance heightened by the tilting wall behind him. This divides the plain background into subtly differentiated sections, a foil for skilled depictions of facial features and lived-in fabrics. Blank eyes meet ours as the subject’s thoughts turn inward and smoke furls up from his cigarette into the blackness.

While Berkery strives to evoke a sense of realness and presence, interpersonal engagement is intriguingly elusive. The flip-flop wearing duo in Robes stare out from features masked by passages of paint; in The Bath, we are excluded from a father’s loving focus on his sleeping infant, who is submerged in sky-coloured water; and in Lunch in the Meadow, a youth glances out over our shoulder through cool, distracted eyes, immersed in his own closely-observed moment in time.

Among the ‘contemporary’ grouping, psychology overtakes nostalgia in Pensive, Wish You Were Here and Lime Light, all featuring male subjects. Their female counterparts in Lady and the Cherry Blossoms and Think of You display less emotionally-charged, ‘airbrushed’ perfection, their beauty conflated with that of the surrounding flowers. In the former, flawless features emerge from a flattened, decorative surface with overtones of anime and traditional Japanese prints, while in the latter, the subject’s hair is adjusted as her thoughts roam elsewhere.

The female in White Room wears rock boots and stands incongruously on a chair. Her head, leaning back, is framed by a hanging plant, its tendrils echoing the necklace that reaches down, like her hand, towards a gaping mini skirt. As an undisguised erotic image, the whiteness of the room could allude to purity or transcendence, while the wafting curtain recalls Venus nudes, revealed by a drawn-back drape. This work’s complex iconography reflects a contradictory culture that tends to view women as either sexualised or feminist. It is interesting, then, that the smaller Pensive, hung opposite, depicts a male withdrawing from view, his gaze shielded by his hand. Wearing only a trench coat, he is naked and exposed, the composition cropped just shy of his genitals.

The watery-eyed subject in the neighbouring Wish You Were Here cuts a grungy figure holding a toxic-pink amorphous skull with writhing forms that leap from his grasp, while an empty speech bubble underscores unspoken desolation and anger. Despite Berkery’s reluctance to read paintings like texts, there are notes in ‘Contemporary Paintings’ relating to love, sex, death, loss and gender representation – all themes reflective of humanity. It will be interesting to see, as he builds his oeuvre, if this artist’s clear talent and eclectic approach will continue to evolve these different pathways or coalesce in a unified, singular style.

Susan Campbell is a final-year PhD candidate at the University of Dublin, Trinity College.

Image credits:
Shane Berkery, Robes, 2017, oil on canvas, 140 x 100cm; image courtesy the artist and Molesworth Gallery
Shane Berkery, Lunch in the Meadow, 2017, oil on canvas; image courtesy the artist and Molesworth Gallery

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