Visual Arts: A brief outline of the genesis of Liza Nguyen's exhibition, Souvenirs of Vietnam, does little to prepare you for the nature of the show itself, writes Aidan Dunne.
Nguyen, who was born and is based in France, but whose father was Vietnamese, travelled to Vietnam for the first time in 2000. The images in her show derive from this visit. We might expect a conventional pictorial examination of the legacy of a hugely destructive war, and to some extent we find that in the form of a number of sets of concertina, postcard-style prints.
Thematically arranged, the groups of cards depict such things as abandoned bunkers, war memorials, cemeteries, and preserved foetuses and living children displaying the horrific effects of Agent Orange. The format acknowledges that Vietnam is a tourist destination while the content points to things that sit uneasily with the notion of tourism. But these cards are but one strand of the show. In terms of scale, by far the most dominant constituents are close-up photographs of soil samples recorded in a uniform circular format.
As she travelled through the country, Nguyen collected handfuls of earth. There is a forensic quality to her minutely detailed studies of soil, sand and stone, particularly when you read the adjacent labels indicating their sources. It is as if they are a travelogue of well-known battles and atrocities: Dien Bien Phu, Khe Sanh, My Lai and so on. While the pictures are always visually interesting, reflecting local geology and recent history in terms of colour and texture, they are also about what we do not see.
You may find this perverse. Surely the whole point of a photographer visiting Vietnam is to show us things through her chosen medium? But like many contemporary practitioners of photography, Nguyen's work reflects a dissatisfaction with or scepticism about the conventions of photographic narrative. She wants to draw our attention to what is not generally or easily depicted. The same issue arises in a photographic book she made in 2003, Mon Père, also on view in the gallery. A documentary investigation into her father's life in terms of the places he was resident, the clothes he wore, the implements he used and the people to whom he was related, it stops short of depicting her father himself. He, she concludes, remains an enigma. In the end, Nguyen is urging us to look further into ourselves, to look beyond formulaic representations. This does not mean that she devalues the visual in her own work, which is beautifully made and consistently engrossing.
In 2003 Brendan Earley ingeniously re-created the iconic monument from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in Pallas Heights, a temporary exhibition space located in a vacated flat in Seán Tracey House on Dublin's Buckingham Street. As a site-specific installation, it was well-nigh perfect: the monolith as a symbol of the modernist Utopian dream, the soon-to-be demolished flat block symbolic of the failure of the modernist project, given a specific local edge in terms of the worthy nation-building context.
In his current Temple Bar Gallery show, Towards a large white building, he is still dealing with the same general ideas, though less cogently. The monolith on this occasion is the extraordinary, now somewhat forlorn concrete observation tower in Lough Key Forest Park, another aspirational symbol, this time linked to the flush of enthusiasm for afforestation. Earley has made a series of drawings in black marker of the conifer forest and the tower. Laid out in a grid plan and dominated by the rhythmic verticals of the tree trunks, the forest is a direct counterpart of the building. Earley's style of representation mimics the architectural sketch, appealing to a quasi-photographic authority.
The drawings complement a sculptural installation, apparently based on a building by Michael Scott, Ireland's pioneering modernist architect. Earley's mock-up of Scott's building is a rough-and-ready assemblage of veneered chipboard, a staple synthetic sheet material, and patterned glass. Which is where things become more problematic. Perhaps he has not pitched the degree of rough-and-readiness precisely enough, but what he has made simply doesn't work as an architectural model, and it is not clear to what extent that is his point.
It might be, for example, that he is implying we currently recycle high modernism in the debased currency of cut-price flat-pack furniture, which is what his construction uncannily resembles: a kind of garbled flat-pack sideboard. Modernism has become a parody of itself, in other words, just another style to be ironically recycled. But one is left with the impression that he has come slightly adrift conceptually: surely the sculptural piece should be made with enough flair to momentarily convince us of its modernist credentials before allowing doubt to creep in, for example, but instead, with our very first glance, we begin with doubt about what on earth it might be.
Eamon Colman's Salt River at Hillsboro Fine Art features a series of paintings made in response to walks along the Barrow and the Suir. While there is a sense of movement in the work, don't expect a catalogue of landmark sites of the two rivers. Colman is a lyrical painter, and in travelling he absorbs the character of a place in the broadest way, assimilating sensations and stories alike. The aim in the paintings is to evoke a totality of experience. They are accounts of the way we experience landscape rather than landscapes per se.
Recognisable motifs do appear: the shape of a mountain or the outline of a house, trees and clouds. But the forms are hinted at rather than exhaustively described. In a way they have to be cast adrift from their anecdotal origins to work in Colman's painterly world. They have to float free in an imaginatively conceived space in a way not unlike that of Howard Hodgkin's paintings, and Hodgkin is an acknowledged influence. In their use of colour, their rhythmic compositions, you could say they are feel-good paintings, which is no bad thing.
Reviewed
Souvenirs of Vietnam, Liza Nguyen, Gallery of Photography until May 21 (01-6714654) Towards a large white building, Brendan Earley until May 27 (01-6710073)
Salt River, Eamon Colman, Hillsboro Fine Art until April 29 (01-6777905)
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