Reviewed: BT Slocket, Hall, Walsh, Murray, Eid, Temple Bar Gallery, until February 3rd - In Search of Experience, Green on Red Gallery, until February 2th - Simon McWilliams, Solomon Gallery, ends today - Florence Biennale, Ashford Gallery.
The intriguingly titled Slocket, Hall, Walsh, Murray, Eid, at the Temple Bar Gallery, and In Search of Experience at Green on Red are both group exhibitions that present the viewer with a series of guessing games - such as what the titles might mean. In the case of the former it's clear enough. It's a list of the surnames of the participating artists. But beyond that the show is like one of those mysteries in which investigators have to puzzle out obscure links between names on what seems to be a list chosen entirely at random.
In this case, delve into their pasts and you find that their dark secret is that each of them, at some time, was based in Temple Bar Studios. A consortium of directors, present and past, has chosen them, presumably out of all the artists to have done so, to exhibit. Their grouping and selection is nowhere explained and doesn't become any clearer in the light of the work in the exhibition.
Babette Eid is most immediately impressive. Her cast-sugar and photographic installation is very striking and deserves its own space, which it almost but not quite receives. Each sugar pillow bears the image of a victim of violence in Kosovo. It's difficult to produce such an explicit intervention into current events without seeming to indulge in liberal hand-wringing, but hers is a genuinely affecting, understated and atmospheric piece, with a compelling image at its heart.
Louise Walsh's venture in digital imagery looks very promising. She subverts the heroic stereotype with views of female figures flying against the Dublin city skyline. Anne Slocket's use of dogs in photographs dealing with "trust and betrayal", inspired by her own fear of dogs, is more interesting in conception than execution. Perhaps it's not quite there yet. It's a pity that Patrick Hall shows no paintings, but that's not to disparage his line drawings, densely packed with personal, idiosyncratic symbols and narratives. And the show provides a welcome opportunity to catch up with the work of experimental film-maker Julie Murray, who has been based in the US for many years.
The Green on Red show is subtitled Reconsidering the Readymade, and has a single curator, artist Finola Jones. But her reconsideration of the readymade, in the form of work by a half-dozen artists, extends in most cases to dispensing with the readymade, at least in the Duchampian sense of a pre-existing, preferably mass-produced object arbitrarily identified as a work of art by an artist. This calls for artists not to do what they are generally inclined to do: to get materials and objects and mess around with them or make them into something else entirely. Duchamp was more disciplined about this when he placed a urinal on a plinth and called it Fountain than most of these artists manage to be - not that they set out to be.
Rather, what they set about doing is what many contemporary artists do, and that is a kind of tweaking: playing around with things so that their existing cultural meaning is altered, perhaps subverted. This often involves working with found objects (which involve the exercise of personal taste and are not, as Duchamp pointed out, the same thing as readymades), as in the case of Caroline McCarthy's witty Wish You Were Here, in which images of plants culled from magazines or catalogues are arranged in soil-filled plastic containers, or Bronwyn Platten's boxing glove puppet. She also shows a genuine readymade in the form of a china plate, engagingly titled Untitled (For Madame Bovary). Her hugely enlarged model of a found object, a folded paper boat, is also one of the show's outstanding pieces. What Jones seems to be looking for are works that make us double-take, and by and large she manages to find them.
Simon McWilliams, the young Ulster artist whose show ends today at the Solomon Gallery, is a promising painter. His pictures are briskly and plainly made, with no time or effort wasted on embellishment. Their surfaces invariably feature an interesting play of colour and texture. He responds to the urban environment and has come up with some outstanding paintings with buildings - and in one case a football stadium - as their main subject, which is no mean feat. A huge study of an oil rig at the Harland & Wolff shipyard goes a little awry but it is to his credit that he is willing to take chances.
Florence Biennale in Dublin has just ended at the Ashford Gallery. A group exhibition, it consisted of work by 15 Irish artists who showed at a Biennale in Florence last December. Six of them picked up awards there. It was a varied show, with a bias towards representational, even academic painters, including, indeed, RHA president Carey Clarke. There was some outstanding work of its type, such as the fine landscapes by Barbara Warren and Jacqueline Stanley, plus some bold figuration from James Hanley (a diptych from 1996). All the exhibitors are estimable artists, so the following reservations about the biennale in no way reflect on them.
The Florence Biennale differs from other biennials in that it describes itself as an artist-financed exhibition. But I must confess to harbouring some doubts about its organisation since I received a letter from the Biennale inviting me to select Irish artists for inclusion, and promising a sizeable bounty for every one I could deliver, the snag being that, for their part, each "selected" artist would have to cough up a very substantial fee. In the event the Irish artists managed to raise sufficient sponsorship to ensure their participation, which doesn't mitigate the fact that the real criterion for inclusion seemed to be financial. That seems like a less than ideal principle on which to select a biennale and suggests that the whole event comes perilously close to being a visual arts equivalent of vanity publishing.
