VISUAL ARTS: NEVAN LAHART'S Ugly Lovelyat the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery is an extended riff on just a single motif, but it's a virtuoso performance, a bravura display, and you're left with the feeling that there's plenty more inventiveness where that came from.
The motif is the plant, as defined to encompass trees, shrubs and other flowering specimens, including at least one cartoon cactus. One other image, that of a cage or enclosure, does appear, but Lahart convincingly ties it into the tree theme. It’s a busy exhibition, and it’s chiefly busy demonstrating that pretty much any material or object the artist happens upon or chooses can be persuaded to add something useful or enlightening, not to mention entertaining, to the central stem.
A substantial torn and ragged branch extends from a wall-mounted board like a pair of antlers in Wouldn't it be fabulous to have a home that could take it?An upended broom on an improbably tall handle is The Giraffe Tree. The Trash Treeis a stuffed green bin bag surmounting a tall trunk. The cages are both representations of plants, schematic accounts of the organism as a system, and also a reference to the human liking for taxonomy, for order and coherence, as in the Darwinian Tree of Knowledge, with its network of enclosures.
The plant, the tree, is a promisingly symbolic motif, one that might offer all manner of interpretative possibilities. And yet, and yet . . . one has the distinct feeling that for Lahart the tree is both important in itself and also a kind of McGuffin, an essentially arbitrary plot device with more than enough branches on which to hang the show’s displays of prolific inventiveness. This is not to disparage either the motif or the inventiveness. Quite the reverse.
Lahart has always shown a gift for resourceful and inventive improvisation, as well as a flair for elaborating an offhand aesthetic. The latter has to do with knowing when to stop, when not to press any particular material or image too much, and how to harness their inherent nature to your own ends.
But these qualities have never been so coherently and impressively deployed before. It’s as if he’s narrowing the focus the better to indicate the range of which he’s capable. That range, he is saying, doesn’t depend on using up half the world in terms of imagery and ideas – a suspicion that attended some of what he’s done in the past – but is innate, and can flourish on the basis of the simplest given concern, just as many plants survive as opportunistic invaders, finding niches in the most unpromising environments. Or, to put it another way, great oaks from little acorns grow.
EILEEN NEFF, whose exhibition Between Usis at the Royal Hibernian Academy, is a latter-day René Magritte. In place of oil paint and canvas, however, she uses digital photography to create images that disarm us with their apparent ordinariness before pulling us up short as we note their practical impossibility. One aspect of a scene, for example, implies that we are in motion, even as another implies absolute stillness. Mismatched sections of a single landscape suggest that different times of the day are contained in a common moment.
Other contradictory mismatches also feature, involving inside and outside, two and three dimensions, image and object.
Born in Philadelphia in 1945 (this is an edited version of a show already seen at the ICA in Philadelphia), Neff did make paintings at one stage, moving on to the camera, the photographic print, the cut-out and the collage in installations. Digital photography has meant that the technique of collage is effected in the black box of the computer rather than the real world. She doesn't always employ digital legerdemain in her images. Her photographs of two intertwined trees, The Coupleimages, for example, are straightforward records of a real location. On the way home from a birding trip one day, she happened on the remarkable sight of a huge walnut tree that seemed to enfold a smaller red cedar.
There is a lightness and humour to Magritte’s paintings, a mischievousness, that in no way undercuts the perceptual and philosophical dimensions of his work. One could say that there’s a humorous quality to some of what Neff does, as well, notably in pieces featuring a wandering cotton-wool cloud or her general liking for visual puns. That’s one side to the character of her work. The other, which tends to win out, is more earnest, more self-consciously serious in its academic engagement with aspects of art history and with literary models, including Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore.
Documented installations relating to those poets come across as being quite schematic, and that is true of many of Neff's photographic images per se as well. It's as if the meanings are too consciously implanted in the images, so that they don't manage to take on a life of their own. Occasionally they do, as in The Birds, featuring unexpectedly brilliant visitors in a muted forest setting. Another issue is the thinness of texture of many of the images in the exhibition. Printed on a large scale, they can appear overextended, literally and figuratively.
Over the Hill, one of the more successful, is actually fairly compact.
It and related pieces are long horizontal landscapes in which closely related views have been spliced, not quite seamlessly, together. The resultant views feature topographical impossibilities, but in a relaxed, nicely understated way. There’s something a bit unsettling about these semi-suburban landscapes, which verge on the gothic, and that’s a good thing. Neff’s best work has an edge of one kind or another.
Ugly Lovely, new work by Nevan Lahart. Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Chancery Lane, Dublin. Until Jan 31
Between Us, photographic works by Eileen Neff. Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallagher Gallery, 15 Ely Place, Dublin. Until Feb 15
