Visual Arts: In A Staggering Ten Million at The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon, Yvonne Cullivan's large-scale colour photographs present us with images of an Ireland that has been all but eclipsed by the Celtic Tiger, a rural domain of abandoned and derelict homesteads. Cullivan's images dwell on details of interiors with ambivalent fascination.
On the one hand, one imagines that in such damp, impoverished surroundings, life must have been tough and uncomfortable. On the other, colour photography tends to aestheticise the most unlikely subjects and she clearly relishes the chromatic intensity of organic decay, as moulds flourish in old walls, for example.
The high number of deserted cottages, often stocked with poignant reminders of lives lived in them, used to be in part an index of rural depopulation and in part a symptom of gradual modernisation. New bungalows adjacent to old houses are still quite a common sight throughout Ireland. But in terms of depopulation, the pressure is now largely in the other direction, as the proliferation of one-off housing threatens to do away with the category of the rural in many parts of the country. Not everywhere, however, at least as yet. Cullivan concentrated on one centre of depopulation and the houses she depicts were all encountered during her exploration of "the barren folds of Glangevlin" in west Co Cavan.
In a statement she mentions "interiors live with movement" and besides capturing something of that active degeneration in her still images, her accompanying video offers a time-based response. It is very thoughtfully done. She positions her camera, leaves it alone, and allows each place to impart a sense of its own atmosphere.
Mounted on the wall, meanwhile, are printed quotations from Glangevlin resident, young and old, comparing the old times with the present times.
The show's title comes from the response of a national-school pupil to an advertisement in the property pages offering a piece of farmland "for, like . . . a staggering 10 million!" Generally the quotations are brief and to the point. They note that good things as well as bad are lost with change, but don't, on the whole, get all dewy eyed about the good old days. "They were cold . . . Ah, Cold . . ." as someone plausibly remarks. Several people remark on the ballooning size of contemporary one-off houses. Cullivan's show provides a worthy imaginative response to a moment of quiet historical change.
ADRIAN PACI IS an Albanian-born artist resident in Milan. His installation Apparizione consists of two facing video projections. On one screen we see a young child, a bit restless, intermittently singing snatches of song. On the opposite screen about a dozen people, mostly elderly, are gathered together in a room. With expressions of fond concern, they too break into intermittent song in between spells of waiting patiently.
The underlying logic here is that the child is Paci's daughter and that she sings in Italian. Her receptive audience is made up of her relations still based in Albania, and they of course sing in Albanian. Apparizione evokes the experience of the idea of home, of geographical separation, of families broken up, connections and traditions severed, of change. The pregnant pauses that take up much of the screen time presumably relate to distance and discontinuity.
Paci's work is a way of articulating the personal realities of such commonplace but nonetheless profound and difficult experiences.
The format, of opposed projections generating a cumulative meaning, is by now widely used in installation work. It was used to extraordinary effect by the Iranian-born, New York based Shirin Neshat, for example, in her award-winning Turbulent in 1998, and Paci's piece has odd echoes of that, but virtually nothing of its formal coherence and narrative concentration.
While the responsiveness of the audience of relatives in Apparizione is indeed touching, Paci seeks to elicit an emotional response from his wider audience - us - that he doesn't really do anything to earn. The disparity in scale and presentation between the child, who virtually fills the frame on a larger than life scale, and the patient older people, establishes an unequal relationship, as though the child is a godlike figure worthy of unquestioned adoration, something underlined by the very title of the installation. But those who are little gods in the eyes' of their parents can be wilful little monsters to nearly everyone else, and the piece is undone by the lazy assumption at its heart.
THE THIRD SHOW at The Dock that deals directly or obliquely with ideas relating to home is A Real Corner of the World, consisting of paintings and works on paper by Fionna Murray. She deals with a fragmented world, or more accurately perhaps with the fact that we all inhabit fragmented worlds, political, social and cultural spaces made up of myriad, overlapping frameworks of meaning and values, something that is reflected in the fragmentary nature of her work.
One wall is given over to clusters of disparate images, a tactic that has become widespread in contemporary art at the moment.
She employs a painterly idiom that is also current: a simplified approach to imagery derived from multiple sources, a limited palette, a quizzical obliqueness. Several pieces recall the spare, impoverished representation characteristic of the work of Norbert Schwantowski. The work is thoroughly competent and engaging without ever quite becoming compelling in its own right, perhaps because it is, in the end, so closely aligned with a widespread current style.
A Staggering Ten Million Yvonne Cullivan; Apparizione Adrian Paci; A Real Corner of the World Fionna Murray. Plus Robin Whitmore's Dream Diary. The Dock, St George's Terrace, Carrick-on-Shannon Mon-Sat 10am-6pm. Ends Dec 8
