Paradise lost but atmosphere found

Aidan Dunne reviews the latest exhibitions

Reviewed:
Serpentine Musings, The Royal Art Lodge
The Paradise, Clare Richardson, Douglas Hyde Galleries 1 and 2 until Apr 9 (01-6081116)
Seven Years and other works, Trish Morrissey, Gallery of Photography until Apr 3 (01-6714654)
Claire Kerr, paintings, Ashford Gallery until Mar 24 (01-6612558)
The Colour of Love and Loss, Suzy O'Mullane, Blue Leaf Gallery until Mar 24 (01-6623682)

The work of the Royal Art Lodge is very laid back indeed. The Lodge is made up of a group of ex-students of the University of Manitoba. In 1996 they began to meet every Wednesday evening in a Winnipeg studio to paint together. One person might begin a piece and pass it on to the next, and so on. The work in the Douglas Hyde consists of a large number of images made to a uniform small square format. It's graphic, anecdotal and whimsical in nature, but a great deal of it is also quietly downbeat, even morbid. This may be appropriate given that the lodge may be on its last legs as its members disperse. It's currently down to two, apparently, Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, with the departure of Marcel Dzama to New York.

Serpentine Musings, as it is called, is a very engaging show. The works are simply hung along the gallery walls in a line, close together. If one doesn't interest you, you can move quickly on to the next. This is likely to happen, because some of the individual pieces are positively irritating, recalling the doodles of bored secondary school students: an off day at the lodge. Yet there are good qualities as well: wit, sardonic humour, visual inventiveness, good colour sense, felicitous touches, quirkiness.

Each piece isn't much larger than a CD case and one feels that album covers, including CD covers, are a major influence. As perhaps are music, illustrated story books, comics and cartoons. Captions and longer passages of text play an important role. The collaborative structure encourages concision and simplicity, and something like a deadpan, faux naif quality. In fact, the work of outsider artists comes consistently to mind, several images specifically recalling the fantasy narratives of one of the most famous of outsider artists, Henry Darger. The abiding impression is of an attempt to create a space apart, a reflective space.

In which regard, Clare Richardson's photographs, which occupy the Hyde's Gallery 2 as an instalment in the ongoing series of shows on the theme of The Paradise, are interesting. Previously exhibited and reproduced in a variety of contexts, they are striking images, part of a body of work titled Harlemville. They document life at a Rudolph Steiner community in New York, and they depict a group of children at play in an idyllic pastoral landscape. Richardson has the knack of imbuing her images with a dreamy atmosphere of heightened realism, and the photographs have the considered presence of classical paintings.

There is nothing at all sinister about them, yet they do not simply amount to an unclouded picture of paradise. Seeing the children covered in mud, and playing in a stream, one inevitably thinks of Lord of the Flies. In the midst of activity, Richardson opts for moments of stillness, and it is as if the seeds of discontent are contained with these reflective moments. We know that human beings will always be, so to speak, strangers in paradise.

Trish Morrissey's Seven Years, at the Gallery of Photography, is a fantastic exhibition. It is a complex project that must have involved a huge amount of meticulous research and planning, but it couldn't be simpler in its finished form. With her elder sister (the title refers to the age difference between them), Morrissey set about recreating a number of archetypal family snapshots - various family members at the beach, by the garden wall, by the front door. She and her sister play all the family members (both real and imagined, an accompanying note mentions intriguingly). Having scoured family attics and charity shops for clothing and props suitably redolent of the 1970s and 1980s, she made a remarkable set of images that are both familiar - we can all identify with such photographs - and disturbing.

They are disturbing because, although the images are of exceptionally good quality, they invariably look wrong. It's not the fact that her sister will appear as a man in one image and a child in another that jars. In fact it's amazing how readily our eyes accept such incongruities when the trappings are right. It's more that a feeling of sadness, perhaps related to the passing of time and the discontents of family life, pervades the atmosphere.

In any case, they are photographs that hold our gaze with almost hypnotic power. There are also two video pieces, one of them showing as well in EV+A. In it, two women in wedding dresses dance in a fairly grim back yard. In the other, a boy chases but never catches a rabbit around a suburban garden - a piece of symbolism that is heavy-handed compared with everything else in the show.

Claire Kerr's Ashford Gallery show, made up of a number of paintings of varying though generally very small sizes, is a gem. On the whole the images are brilliantly painted, with an unerring sense of colour and tone. They have a photographic character about them, but they work very well as paintings. The subject matter is workaday, mostly of scenes around Dublin.

Occasionally, the idea of process is brought into play as sketches and a small notebook are rendered in oil paint with meticulous realism. But Kerr doesn't particularly push this aspect of things. Despite a high level of detail, the images never feel cramped. She has the ability to generate a sense of a living, breathing world on a small scale. The suppleness and intricacy of what she does brings to mind Dutch painting from the age of Vermeer, which is no small compliment.

Just ended at the Blue Leaf Gallery, Suzy O'Mullane's drawings and paintings are figure studies that blend over into portraits. Her satyrs and seraphim are thoughtful, wistful, intense accounts of male figures. The seraphim are winged, unobtrusively so, so that the device doesn't seem at all forced. There are monochromes of female figures as well, using even greater concentrations of dense black compressed charcoal. Then, as if to break the spell, a series of flowers and a sequence of self-portraits runs through a bright, vibrant palette. She is always equal to suggesting inner life, individuals alone with their own thoughts and feelings.