VISUAL ARTS/AIDAN DUNNE:For his installation at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Brendan Earley acquired a lot of Ikea flat-pack furniture, three kitchens and half a living room's worth.
Rather than following the assembly instructions, he's joined it all up any which way to create a kind of generic modernist assemblage, all right angles and melamine-veneered chipboard.
There's a certain tackiness to the materials and the way they are exposed. It could be titled something like "Modernism's House of Cards", given the implied view of modernism as a set of conventions tailored to market forces, a fatally compromised utopia. This is a view bolstered by a photograph of retail warehousing hanging on an adjacent wall.
As always with Earley's work, we are presented with a number of ideas relating to architecture and design, and their entanglement with social and economic realities. Where his installation runs into problems, though, is in the area of its own physical fabric. One expects a little more. The mismatched Ikea flat-packs look like mismatched Ikea flat-packs anomalously arranged. If, for example, some ambiguity had been built in, as though it was a semi-kitchen, semi- something else, the effect might have been much greater. As it is, it falls, so to speak, a bit flat.
As part of the second part of The Curated Visual Arts Award Exhibition, Earley shares the main gallery space with Bea McMahon and it looks as if she, too, has been fretting about modernity. Her two-part projected film piece, [in,the] visible state, takes an iconic site of Irish modernity, the Belfield UCD campus, with its looming water-tower, and juxtaposes it with footage that may depict work on the construction of the super particle accelerator (designed to detect what has been nicknamed "the God particle") at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, as well as a view of a man in silhouette referring to, or even reading, a papal encyclical. All of this is only murkily apprehended because the sound is muffled and the imagery is projected on to mirrored screens "coated with buttermilk". Whether this is for optical or symbolic reasons is not indicated, but the whole thing is certainly atmospheric and even vaguely apocalyptic.
The piece could be taken to refer obliquely to science's challenge to the authority of revealed religion, and there are further references to what, in the parlance of the late Louis Althusser, would be called the state ideological apparatus, the usually invisible and implicit means by which the nebulous but all-powerful state maintains control over the minds and actions of its notionally autonomous citizens. Which is where, presumably, there is a degree of congruence between the work of the two artists: architectural fabric meets systems of social organisation.
In Gallery Two, Isabel Nolan's paintings and a single sculpture evoke states of fragility and are themselves mostly fragile and perishable. They make for a really good installation. The moments on which her work focuses are precarious and haunted by the threat and, on occasion, the actuality of loss. Powerful, overwhelming emotions wait in the wings. Perhaps that is why she is so drawn to motifs of lightness, optimism and the fugitive possibility of happiness as a kind of transcendence.
GOING BACK 10 years or more, Michael Boran used to construct toy-sized vignettes, using plastic figurines and other props and, by photographing the scenes he created, recast them as "real". More recently, he's been photographing the real world in ways that suggest it's not as real as we might think. In Voyager, at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, he offers us images of people in transit or momentarily adrift, more often than not photographed from a height, so that they are foreshortened against expanses of ground that seem to contain and envelop them.
Because they are paved or, in at least one case, painted with traffic markings, the backgrounds have a grid-like character, and it is as though Boran, from a position of omniscience, is manoeuvring chess pieces on a board. The idea of orientation comes up several times - they may occupy positions on a grid, but some of the people in the photographs seem unduly preoccupied with establishing just where they are. Others have the appearance of being aimless onlookers, tourists unsure of just what it is they are supposed to find interesting.
Boran likes playing on the flatness of the background, which becomes in his hands a picture plane. He is a little too fond of using a double-exposure effect, whereby the figures become ghostly, semi-transparent presences, but he is generally judicious about employing digital manipulation to achieve his effects. Enter the labyrinthine game of flatness and depth, reality and illusion that he has constructed, and you're soon convinced that he has a real visual intelligence.
CATHERINE GREENE'S SCULPTURES in her exhibition, Unknown World, at the Cross Gallery, collectively evoke a consistent allegorical realm and, as the title suggests, they are concerned with the process of finding our place and making sense of our position in the world.
Greene builds up a cast of characters, existing mythological protagonists such as Daedalus and Icarus, historical figures and her own imagined medieval-looking scholars and jesters. These figures explore the inner realms of subjective experience as well as the earth, visualised as a globe in several striking pieces.
Greene has great feeling for character and movement, and while various aspects of her work give it a retrospective character, it is also freshly contemporary.
ROBERT BATES, at the Molesworth Gallery makes tiny, intricately detailed representational paintings, some drawn directly from the workaday landscape, presumably his own, in the south-west, and some more narratively contrived. There is always the risk that the latter will become overly sweet and storybook-like, but on the whole, despite one or two close shaves, they don't.
They do recall the calmness and serenity of the work of the renowned landscape painter and engraver, Samuel Palmer, which balances an inner vision with the outer world.
Even Bates's more objectively descriptive pieces have this quality, so that each image is intensely alive. It is remarkable work that has to be seen at first hand.
The Curated Visual Arts Award Exhibition, Part 2, featuring Brendan Earley and Bea McMahon and, in Gallery Two, Isabel Nolan, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin (Mon-Fri 11am-6pm, Thurs 11am-7pm, Sat 11am-4.45pm), until April 10; Voyager, Michael Boran, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, 66 Great Strand Street, Dublin 1, until Mar 29; Unknown World, Catherine Greene, Cross Gallery, 59 Francis St, Dublin 8, until Mar 29; Robert Bates watercolours, Molesworth Gallery, 16 Molesworth Street, Dublin 2 (Mon-Fri 10.30am-5.30pm, Sat 11am-3pm), until Mar 29
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