Desolate expanses of conifer plantation, cloudy mountain vistas, evening skies reflected darkly in still water: Elizabeth Magill's work at the Kerlin Gallery looks suspiciously like an exhibition of landscape paintings. But she is distinctly wary of pinning it down.
"It has more to do with the idea of a boundless territory than a landscape as such," she explains. "What I was trying to do was create room for myself to work in. So they're more to do with the idea of space, of making spaces, than with landscape as such." These spaces offer potential: "They leave room for things to happen."
The paintings are what happen. In them, Magill has come up with a body of strange, dislocated images, shot through with a kind of late romantic melancholy: romanticism revisited from a post-modern perspective, but without the sense of ironic superiority that such a description might imply. The elements that make up each individual image are curiously disconnected, as though they are collaged together a la Robert Rauschenberg. In fact they are assembled in pretty much this way, drawn from a range of references and imported intact into the relevant composition, without being rearranged to accord with a coherent sense of perspective, for example. They derive from "photographs and other images that I've accumulated over the years. This is a way of placing them."
The paint, too, is allowed to pursue its own agenda. Indicating an expanse of sky in Cloud Scene, Magill observes: "If you look at it it's not a sky at all, it's just paint." That is to say, we read it as sky, and obviously she knows we read it as sky, but sure enough when you look closely it's just a collection of drips and blurs and smudges of pigment. Sometimes these touches are allowed to become quite intrusive. "They come from the accumulated mistakes you make as you paint. If they inform the work in an interesting way I leave them in. Not always. Sometimes the process dictates how it will end up, sometimes it pushes it in a direction I don't want."
There's often a whimsical edge to the way she sets about stopping the images taking themselves too seriously. In Cloud Scene, for example, you can spot bubbles drifting among the clouds, while the night sky in Lake View glitters with cut-glass "stars" embedded in its surface. Not surprisingly, there is a guarded, sceptical quality to the finished paintings in the way they undercut the possibility of achieving either seamless illusionism or high-minded pictorialism. But they are also atmospherically consistent, drawing us persuasively into their disconnected world. It's an exhibition that takes time but rewards patience, for Magill is an unfailingly intelligent artist. As she puts it: "I suppose my work is mostly about looking and thinking. And thinking about how to look."
Ita Freeney's paintings, which share the Paul Kane Gallery with work by Deirdre O'Brien, also have clear associations with landscape without being landscapes per se. In compositions marked out with just a few linear divisions, Freeney uses earthy colours in misty, atmospheric masses. To her credit, there's absolutely nothing superfluous in the work, her muted palette is very sound, and, while it's not quite there yet it is very promising. An air of New Age mysticism pervades Deirdre O'Brien's hazy studies of castles and abbeys, striking for their unabashed use of intense reds. They are strong on atmosphere, but otherwise a little too vague.
Place Present at the City Arts Centre is a documentary project in which Chris Maguire takes a look at the area where he grew up and where he has chosen to live. By doing so he explores his own position within that community. As it happens he comes from Rialto, a mixture of flat complexes and streets of red brick housing, and an area with a raft of problems to contend with.
The three strands that make up the show are documentary photographs of daily life and individuals, a video and a small group of drawings. The photographs make up a valuable record, for example in offering real insights on the way people relate to the spaces they inhabit. The drawings have a nice, graphic solidity to them but in this context are peripheral. The video, made with Edna O'Brien, is extremely promising, though it doesn't reconcile the conflicting ambitions of documentation and expression.
The first-person narratives, offering different, enlightening perspectives on the community, are engrossing but too long - or at least, they feel too long in the context of the work as a whole. Described as a "virtual tour", one chunk of the video is literally an hypnotic, disorientating tour of the area, which in itself, without a single word being spoken, amounts to a devastating critique of urban planning. There is plenty of material here to warrant further development.
Elizabeth Magill runs at the Kerlin Gallery until February 22nd. Ita Freeney and Deirdre O'Brien, runs at The Paul Kane Gallery until February 20th. Chris Maguire, Place Present, runs at the City Arts Centre until February 6th.
