Once Is Too Much is the title of an exhibition resulting from an extended project run between IMMA and the Family Resource Centre, St Michael's Estate, Inchicore, exploring the issue of violence against women. Eighteen women from the centre began work on the first piece for the exhibition in 1995 and over the intervening time have produced a collection of diverse, fascinating work.
The artists who collaborated with the group on individual works (Rhona Henderson, Ailbhe Murphy, Rochelle Rubinstein Kaplan and Joe Lee) seem to have allowed their own styles and influences to filter the group's ideas. Rhona Henderson collaborated with the group on several works, most notably on Beauty And The Beast, a large mirrored dining table-like installation featuring a tape-looped male voice threatening violence and a "chandelier" constructed from jagged glass fragments and a row of sharp household implements. By no means, however, does all the work deal with issues of violence in such a head-on manner. Indeed, the impact of the show comes from the subtlety with which issues of violence are explored across a range of disciplines, taking in painting and printing as well as installation, film and video.
Among the work created in collaboration with film-maker, Joe Lee, is a video installation in which news footage and commentary on a murder are projected onto the rippled surface of a plastic curtain in an institutional cubical, below which it is just possible to glimpse a hospital trolley.
Until 15th February, 1998.