Shane Lynam: Pebbledash Wonderland
Photo Museum Ireland, Dublin
★★★★☆
Bare cement walls, empty street corners, signless alleys, handrails, dated public amenities, uniform housing estates: Shane Lynam’s photography doesn’t just record forgotten elements of the urban environment; it captures parts that never received recognition or attention in the first place. His observational acuity brings to light corners of the city that are invisible because of their inherently incidental nature. This sensitivity to the components of our urban experience that are designed to remain unnoticed – designed to be hidden even as they are in use – is what gives Lynam’s photography such an intriguingly enigmatic feeling.
As you walk through his exhibition at Photo Museum Ireland, Lynam’s work acquires a double character. On the one hand, Pebbledash Wonderland takes on the semblance of something like a safari or anthropological survey of an extinct culture, with that sense of looking at something never before seen, as if it were rare wildlife untouched by civilisation. On the other hand, the ephemerality of Lynam’s subjects stems from the fact that they are so familiar that they immediately become unremarkable and therefore, in the normal course of events, are simply beneath our notice. This injects a surreal strain into the DNA of the exhibition: we are surrounded by scenes that enframe and display moments that, typically, are so banal as to be imperceptible.
In this sense, Lynam’s work is a kind of visual correspondent to Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic existentialist novel Nausea, where the protagonist Antoine Roquentin experiences a profound disquiet in the presence of everyday objects; he becomes overwhelmed as the backdrop of his life, an endless sequence of mundane things like clouds, toasters and chairs, rushes into the foreground, demanding his conscious attention.
One of the clues to Lynam’s focus in the urban landscape is helpfully provided by curator Darren Campion, in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. (Photo Museum Ireland often produces excellent catalogues; this edition includes another fine piece by Aiden Kelly Murphy). Campion writes that Lynam’s work speaks a “language of fracture” where “visual figures of tension and disjuncture are dominant”. These figures of disjuncture are often beguilingly simple: in one photograph a pair of identical terraced houses are captured because of the contrast in the colour of their garden entrances, one bright red, the other bright blue. The same kind of simple contrast motivates another housing-estate work, where an isolated pair of red and white hydrangeas rebound against one another spectacularly.
And as Campion alludes to, fractures – of the literal, physical variety – similarly preoccupy Lynam’s universe. In one particularly compelling series, Lynam places side by side two photographs that each revolve around a central architectural flaw in the masonry on display, both images punctured by a structural hole or void. And this is not the only “presence of an absence” across the exhibition. One of my favourites is a shot of three poles: a street lamp, a telephone pole and the long, girthy shadow of an unseen pylon, which is simultaneously more pronounced and intangible than the other two. The effect is, once again, dreamlike and expeditionary.
A highly recommended show, from one of Dublin’s most consistent exhibition spaces.
Pebbledash Wonderland continues at Photo Museum Ireland until Saturday October 12th 2024.
