Reviewed: Sequent, Cliona Harmey, Arthouse until September 7th;
Cora Cummins, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until September 2nd;
Emma Crean, Ashford Gallery until August 31th;
Grafton Street's a Wonderland, Eddie Cahill, City Arts Centre;
Iontas 2000, Ormeau Baths Gallery until September 2nd;
Inaugural, The Studios Gallery until August 31st.
On one level, Cliona Harmey's Sequent, at Arthouse, sets up a dialogue between technology and nature. She filters examples of simple natural phenomena - rainfall, a breeze, plants growing and responding to the diurnal cycle - through audio-visual media, encoding snippets of the world as information to be recovered and experienced at will. Yet she does so in ways that subtly undermine the strict categorisation of both nature and technology.
The best piece is a two-screen video installation of Rain falling on water. It chronicles a variety of conditions, from calm to breezy, and is quietly hypnotic - as, indeed, the sight and sound of rain falling on water are. The water surface fills the large screens in front of us, enveloping us like one of Monet's waterlily panoramas, but also providing us with an agreeably dynamic audio-visual experience. Because of the way Harmey has framed her material, making of it a self-contained world, you cannot help but become aware of the enormously complex interlocking patterns unfolding in time and space in a way that refers us directly back to the patterns of information storage and retrieval.
You also feel that she is, quite rightly, greatly taken with the aesthetic properties of her images. To her credit, and notably in Rain, Harmey resists the obvious impulse to complicate her material with tricksy technological play, instead devoting all her efforts to keeping things artfully simple. Don't rely on the website which forms part of the project (http://www.arthouse.ie/exhibitions/sequent/index.html); go and see Rain.
Cora Cummins' prints at Kevin Kavanagh very successfully combine a judicious austerity of expression with the lusciously-textured effects obtainable with carborundum.
Though the work is delicately tonal, colour is used carefully and well, so that in this context even the relatively muted Cornfield comes across as a generous blast of yellow. Her inspiration is landscape, and she likes big, planar expanses. Beach distils its subject into three horizontal, subtly-textured bands of sand, sea and sky, in a work that is well-nigh perfect in its restrained simplicity. But she doesn't just go for broad swathes, and is also attentive to detail in beautifully-articulated studies of reeds, bulrushes and ferns, picked out as elegant forms against varied backgrounds. Most of the work here is exceptionally good, and of a richness that belies its economy of means.
Emma Crean, at the Ashford Gallery, is more tentative in her delicate, mixed-media compositions, based on material collected during her travels in Turkey and Spain. Inspired by such details as "the texture of walls and points of building and stonework", her work is non-representational, though related to the atmosphere of place. But there is something like a recurrent motif in that she always seems to be working towards the articulation of a central space, often a rectangular shape, in a way that recalls Maria Simonds-Gooding. It recalls her not in terms of a particular format, but because of the way she likewise captures a sense of human habitation in a venerable, weathered environment.
Crean builds her images with washes of acrylic paint on Japanese paper, and incorporates little clusters of embroidered thread in a way that's agreeable without being all that purposeful. It is sensitive, instinctive work, but perhaps a bit un-self critical.
Eddie Cahill's sardonically titled Grafton Street's a Wonder- land marks him out as an artist of strength. While his previous work impressed with its intensity, the subjective weight of its expressionism always threatened to overwhelm any other claims it might make. Here, though, working in well-co-ordinated series, he provides a still emotionally-charged but impressively disciplined account of his subjects.
His portrait heads, psychically and sometimes physically bruised and injured, of prisoners and homeless children, suggest the influence of Brian Maguire (an acknowledged influence) in their unaffected directness, their emotional rawness and their identification with outsiders. In terms of visual style they strikingly recall images from Andrey Tarkovsky's film Stalker.
Cahill also devises effective schematic compositions, dramatising a subjective, inner world. One potential problem is what might be described as a lack of resistance in both his means and his subject matter, which gives the show a certain didactic, declamatory quality, whereas Maguire can generate something quite powerful by trying to paint the contradictions. What if Cahill tried to paint something against type?
There is quite a lot of Iontas 2000. There are, in fact, 162 pieces in Slag Art Gallery's annual small works' show, currently showing at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast, which is probably about 50 too many. Not that much of the work is actually bad, but the show does tend to slow down and spread out when it needs to keep moving along. Among pieces that stand out are prints by Elaine Leader, Sang H. Bae, Jackie Crooks, Andrew Folan, Con Kelleher, Catherine Lynch and Rebecca Peart; drawings by Sarah Lombard Brown, John Moore, Dorothy Smith and Ciaran Barra Cronin; and paintings by Edward Kennedy, Louise Neiland, John Kingerlee and Gerard Devlin.
A short walk from the Ormeau Baths, Devlin also shows an outstanding painting in Inaugural, an exhibition at the Studios Gallery, an offshoot of Queen St Artists' Studios, which provides working space for 23 artists.
The gallery is a modest, though useful, space, several storeys up. This introductory show features the work, just one apiece, of studio artists, and the overall impression is of a fairly traditional approach to media and materials from estimable painters like Colin McGookin, Rosie McGurran, Jack Pakenham and Hilary Sloan.
