Possibilities of performance anticipated

VISUAL ARTS:JAKI IRVINE'S Seven Folds in Time is a multi-screen video installation at Temple Bar Gallery, made with the participation of violinist and composer Marja Gaynor and flautist Joe O'Farrell. The press release notes that the installation is about the relationship between music and image, evoking, through the private space of practice, "the possibilities of performance it anticipates".

Enter the gallery and you encounter flat-screen televisions of varying size scattered throughout the room, plus stereo speakers and some notes on sheets of musical manuscript paper. Gaynor is apparently Finnish by birth and, as it happens, the multiple screens recall another Finn, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, and her exhibition in the same venue; but instead of its orderly arrangement of spaces and viewpoints, with office-like fittings and a succession of screenings of different mini-dramas, Irvine’s screens are haphazardly distributed at various angles. Each flickers into life sporadically, relaying tightly framed images of the performers, separately, as they rehearse.

The lighting is hard and in fact everything about the work reinforces this hardness. It’s all fragmented and angular. And also, you realise, repetitious. Irvine seems to be interested in an in-between state, in which the sounds are potentially but not quite music, the activity is methodical but almost mechanical and, as the note says, anticipates an eventual piece.

Equally, what we see is oblique and offhand, details that might at some stage form the content of images but are for now sketchy. The work might then be viewed as a meditation on preparation and completion or, more accurately, on the disparate, piecemeal elements that lead to and enable the living, collaborative moment of coherent performance. In many ways this fits with Irvine’s penchant for states of dreamy indeterminacy in her work to date, though Seven Folds in Time is almost abrasive in its fragmentary effects, with the rawness of orchestral instruments tuning up.

BRIDGET FLANNERY, whose work can be seen at the Cross Gallery, is a painter with a considerable track record. While you could, as Brian Fallon once observed, describe her as a landscape painter, it is more accurate to say she’s a painter of nature. Her paintings emerge from her engagement with the landscape in the widest sense: the character of place and her experience of it; feelings of belonging or not belonging; memories and reflections. The pictures develop a visual language that owes much to abstraction. Their nuanced surfaces recall natural textures, atmospheric subtleties; they are internally consistent, but they are not conventionally representational.

In the past she built up nuanced tonalities with collaged layers of paper saturated with pigment. There was a compressed energy to her compositions, with approximately right-angled blocks of colour arranged in ways that recalled the horizon line. She still likes squarish forms, though her compositional dynamics have developed notably and her use of colour and texture have become increasingly mature and assured.

Her show, which draws on two years’ work, is exceptionally rich and concentrated. In a series of small pieces she cuts into and distorts the surface, bending and curving it in various ways. There is a risk attendant on introducing such a device: that the novelty becomes the main point and is little more than an alibi for the painting that isn’t there. But Flannery doesn’t get distracted by novelty. We never feel that the incisions and distortions are anything but elaborations of the standard plane: they don’t replace it. This is underlined by the show’s small diptychs and larger, integral panels.

The diptychs and small, monochrome panels exploring colour relationships suggest that Flannery isn’t so much trying to abandon what she was doing as look carefully at every element of her visual language. A kind of synthesis is achieved in the final room, which features larger compositions incorporating the incisions that are literally present in the smaller, shaped piece and the chromatic intensities of the small panels. Here her energy is devoted to creating large, central spaces that are charged with energy and potential. They are quietly though surely persuasive.

IN THE CROSS’S ADDITIONAL space, nag, The Outermost House is a solo show by Gabhann Dunne. He is an energetic young painter who marries a vigorous representational approach to elaborate conceptual schemes.

The title of his show is taken from a book by pioneering environmentalist Henry Beston, originally published in the late 1920s and based on time spent in his small, remote beach house

at Cape Cod. Dunne’s concern in his paintings is our relationship with the other species with whom we share the planet.

In one case, in fact, he transports a population of penguins to the moon, from where, massed on the surface, they look back at the earth.

Generally the drama is ratcheted up to something like that degree. Elephants wander on railway lines; a pack of dogs “make a flag” outside the UN Building in New York; and workers look as if they’re engaged in placing imitation plastic wolves throughout Yellowstone Park.

It’s an ambitious show and Dunne delivers his images with engaging theatrical flair. Not surprisingly, his images have a composite look about them, as though various sources have been collaged with Photoshop. A certain coolness and detachment prevents his treatment of a highly charged subject matter from getting too emotional, though his treatment of colour is perhaps a bit overheated. He will, incidentally, be talking about his work in the gallery tomorrow at 1pm.

Seven Folds in Time: Jaki Irvine, with Marja Gaynor and Joe O’Farrell. Temple Bar Gallery, Until Oct 31

New Paintings by Bridget Flannery; plus, in nag, Gabhann Dunne’s The Outermost House. Cross Gallery, Until Oct 31