IT is more than a few steps from the Dublin sunshine to the dismal world featured in Michelle Rogers's painting installation, The Dark House. Behind the door of 50 North Great George's Street, a gentle, crumbling private house, Rogers has constructed a two storey war monument in paint, celebrating not glorious victory, or noble defeat, but simply some long marches to oblivion.
Rogers has included paintings in several sizes along with a portfolio of sketches: everything from a woman hanging lifeless from a branch to bodies at a morluary, all done following her 1993 visit to the former Yugoslavia. Her most forceful work, however, has been saved for a number of largescale paintings which dominate the house's dusky, sparse room.
Lit with footlights, these images, of a weary, teeming procession, or a vast empty library, or of two halves of a cityscape huddled together around a found wooden door, sit almost too comfortably among the bare boards, cracked walls and gently dilapidated Georgian stucco. The impressive images certainly seem to resonate with their settings, but can the artist really mean to associate neglect of Dublin's architecture with the West's reaction to the Bosnian conflict?
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/SJQTLMCMMRC2PLALXUKEWWS6HU.png)