In virtual Belonging at the Temple Bar Gallery, Mary Avril Gillan takes on the challenge of balancing an ambitious video installation and paintings within the space of one exhibition. If it's a contest, the video wins. The paintings, understated and based on a simple, repeated motif, seem to occupy an anteroom to the big, moving images.
The video installation is composed of three simultaneous projections, and it is hypnotically engaging. Gillan capitalises on an essential aspect of the technology she's employing: its capacity for representing motion. It may seem like an obvious point, but most artists who surrender to the apparently irresistible lure of video or, less often, film, proceed to apply them to something static and, it seems, preferably devoid of any intrinsic visual interest.
All three videos record an archetypal journey, a trip across the US on an interstate bus. Our view is through the window, and what we see is a constant horizon line. This straightforward format is complicated by the other images, similarly glimpsed in transit, but offering a closer involvement with the landscape, evoking settlement, habitation and industry.
The combination of different speeds, scales and priorities contrive to create a complex sense of simultaneously experiencing the landscape on several levels at once, and also plays around with our perception of time. This might be even more pronounced if all three images abutted each other - something worth considering, perhaps, in any future presentation. Next to the powerful visual experience of these images, the paintings, which also evoke a state of transit, recede.
With The Hottest Sun, The Darkest Hour at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Jaki Irvine also uses several different projections to engender an overall atmosphere. In fact she uses no less than five looped film projections of varying length and complexity. The simplest, Fireflies at 3 a.m., consists of just an occasional flicker of light against the darkness of the screen, while the most involved, Marco, One Afternoon, is a kind of mini-parody of an old European art movie, in which a self-absorbed Latin Romeo ruminates on a narcissistic flirtatious encounter.
Irvine's installation takes an enjoyably fetishistic relish in the aura and the sheer mechanics of film. The five projectors clattering away in the dark create quite a din, and a physical presence in the gallery - unlike video, which is usually an ethereal, immaterial medium. The various other segments are more ambiguous than the two already mentioned: an androgynous figure flirts with the camera; a dog displays dog-like devotion; a plane takes off and soars above the clouds. All are nostalgically distanced, as if they are fragments of old amateur holiday films, with the haphazard technical quality that implies - and the weight of personal significance. An intensely emotional song adds to the mix. That mix might include ideas of flight, passion, desire, fidelity, regret and memory. Irvine is, to put it mildly, against narrative closure and leaves us to draw our own conclusions.
Charles Tyrrell's exhibition at the Taylor Galleries is very, very good. Tyrrell is a sensible, rational, methodical painter - all terms that may make his work sound dull, but it's anything but. Each piece is made with incredible, closely-argued concentration and rigour, but also with justified trust in the instinctive manual skills that are also part of the process. In fact, far from being dry and cerebral, Tyrrell's painting is always intensely physical.
Broadly speaking, there are three main elements at play in this work. First, there is the underlying grid, a long-term constant for Tyrrell. Second are rich textural surface qualities, intimately related to an earthy palette. And third are the self-contained abstract motifs that have, in a manner of speaking, evolved over some years.
In toto, they make up a prototypical visual language symbolic of the possibilities of painting itself. They evoke some of the concerns evident in the work of Richard Gorman and Sean Scully, and would make a convincing case for themselves in any artistic company. Incidentally, a show of this quality at this stage of Tyrrell's career invites a question: how about a substantial retrospective of his work?
The title of James Hanley's show at the Hallward, Paper Tigers, Stalking-Horses is indicative of the restlessly allusive quality of the work with its half-puns and barbed jokes. Sample: Speech- less is a full-head portrait with the mouth masked off in the shape of two strips of tape. A slick, illustrative style is married to a searching scepticism, inviting us to question appearances, look again and generally take nothing for granted. Hanley relishes technical finesse, with crisp, masked edges dividing pure, unblemished backgrounds of gessoed paper from fully worked motifs. With his hard, searching style and general air of unease, he is actively trying to push the language of representation.
By contrast, Aoife Harrington at the Rubicon Gallery concentrates unwaveringly on just one, simple, virtually abstract motif, an oval eye shape that seems at times to have been burned into the surfaces of her paintings. These surfaces are scored and densely worked, as though they have been built up over a long period of time and burnished by the elements. They suggest a state of deep, meditative intensity and have an organic, self-contained air of completeness about them.
Changing gear again, Beth O'Halloran's work, in Flesh and Air at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, explores the contingency of experience. Her casual, discursive style, in which the images seem to develop through a gradual process of chance and - less obviously - design, is a strategy common enough to qualify as a distinct strand in contemporary art. While her paintings deal with the notion of randomness, they also share with Harrington's work a hermetic, obsessive air. It's as though we're looking at pages from a journal written in an eccentric personal code, except that O'Halloran's work communicates something of the quality of experience.
Mary Avril Gillan's Virtual Belonging is at Temple Bar Gallery until July 2nd; Jaki Irvine's The Hottest Sun, The Darkest Hour at the Douglas Hyde Gallery until July 31st; Charles Tyrrell at Taylor Galleries until July 10th; James Hanley's Paper Tigers, StalkingHorses at the Hallward Gallery until July 7th; Aoife Harrington at the Rubicon Gallery until July 10th; and Beth O'Halloran's Flesh and Air at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until July 3rd
