Reviewed:
Stand Fast Dick &Jane, Project Arts Centre until July 28
Diana Michener, photographs, Gallery of Photography until July 21
Afterwars, Ori Gersht, Belfast Exposed until July 21
Paintings for E, Michael Cullen, Taylor Galleries until July 14 This year's OutArt show dispenses with the format of selecting from open submission, and instead features six American gay and lesbian artists. The title, Stand Fast Dick &Jane, is both accurate enough and a little overwrought, referring to the rock formation on which Project and City Hall are built, and to the gender stereotypes promulgated by those old instructional Ladybird books.
Curators Tom Keogh and Alan Phelan express a desire to move beyond a certain stage of gay art activism - this is my interpretation of their rationale, incidentally, so shouldn't be taken as directly reflecting their views.
Like the one-time rocky obstacle that is integrated into the civic fabric, queer art has been integrated into the mainstream, and the artists here are fighting different if related battles. Usually from a personal perspective, they are revisiting the province of childhood and youth and, as often as not, finding that the personal is political. In this regard, the two most striking artists are Virgil Marti and Marlene McCarty.
Marti's deliriously over-the-top installation, a room wallpapered with fluorescent, patterned paper incorporating the faces, culled from school yearbooks, of those who bullied him in school, is a persuasive work. In atmosphere it is both church-like and garishly excessive (no contradiction there, you might say), and it invites, if not exactly identification, then soul-searching.
In a comparable way, McCarty's stylised, faithfully adolescent-like drawing monumentalises and subverts a conventionally wholesome, unproblematic view of teenage years. The meaning of her image is devastatingly coloured by its accompanying documentary text, which makes for extremely uncomfortable reading and is hard to believe. Her work is disturbing in several ways, but it certainly makes a good case for itself. The balance of the show is made up by Nayland Blake's eating performance, which comes across almost as a parody of endurance performance art; Carrie Noyer's casually interesting, personalised, mandala-like painted assemblages; Donald Moffat's mixed media works, which play incisively on the qualities of materials; and Zoe Leonard's fine photographs, often incorporating scrawled texts in a way that recalls Lee Friedlander's images of graffiti.
Much of Diana Michener's powerful show at the Gallery of Photography does not make for comfortable viewing. Born in Massachusetts, Michener studied painting, but had an epiphanic converstion to photography when she was recovering from a back operation in 1970. Her work has a fierce energy and intensity and, on the face of it, is insistently, almost obsessively concerned with death, or at least with images of death. It is also, it has to be said, fired with a sense of life.
There is a remarkable series of decapitated heads of slaughtered cows, in which the dead animals are imbued with a tragic dignity and a quasi-mythic quality. Studies of preserved foetuses and autopsy shots of cadavers are more gruelling and really not for the faint-hearted. Michener's instinct is always to look closely and unflinchingly, to position her subjects centrally, without distraction or artifice. This is also true of both her series of self-portraits: of heads taken first thing on waking each morning; and an extraordinary series of tough, bleak images, taken in Scotland at midwinter, in which she is naked and usually crudely daubed with paint in the dark landscape.
She has a memorable version of herself as a kind of female St Sebastian in which the arrows are painted onto her body, together with the scrawled words "KISS ME." Her most recent work, The Wrestlers, comes as something of a relief. Although, in these studies of two figures - male and female? - tussling, the subject is ostensibly violence, the images are beautiful accounts of passionate contact in which the bodies are glimpsed as elegant, kinetic blurs.
In Afterwars, at Belfast Exposed Gallery in Belfast, Israeli photographer Ori Gersht shows a series of large colour prints. They fit into the burgeoning category of topographical urban photography typified by Becher. And at first glance, Gersht's images make up an impassive record of a typical European high-rise city. Except that the city is Sarajavo in the aftermath of an enormously destructive civil war, and the high-rise grid is scarred and punctured by all manner of missiles flung at it from the adjacent high ground. Evidence of patchwork repairs suggest the notion of people living like cave-dwellers in the ruins of modernity.
A layer of irony is added by the fact that the photographer is Israeli, not to mention that the show is running in Belfast as the future of the Good Friday Agreement again looks to be in the balance.
Incidentally, to its great credit, Belfast Exposed has commissioned a photographer, Sean McKernan, "to create an architectural portrait of the city", at a time of frenetic, unpredictable change. Is anything comparable being done in Dublin, which is currently undergoing unprecedented development?
It's hardly giving anything away to note that the E in the title of Michael Cullen's Paintings for E, is his baby daughter, Emily. His bold, brightly-coloured suite of pictures is an autobiographical essay encompassing mother and baby asleep, domestic still life details including Emily's toys, the painter's daily bicycle trip to his studio, an exhibition, a concert and the artist's habitual tussle with the language and history of art. Cullen's own painterly langauge is more pared down and wary than ever.
He lays down intractable blocks of pigment in schematic compositions, admirably eschewing any temptation to make his images ingratiating, no matter how sweet their subject matter.
