VISUAL ARTS: Irregularities by Kathlyn O'Brien showing at the Paul Kane Gallery, Small Steps at the Temple Bar Gallery and Günter Grass: About Drawing and Writing at the Central Library, IlacCentre are reviewed by Aidan Dunne
Kathlyn O'Brien's Irregularities at the Paul Kane Gallery makes a good swan song for what has been a very nice exhibition venue in the heart of the city. Kane is looking for a new home for his gallery, and chances are it will not be in South Frederick St. O'Brien's work, much of which recycles the paraphernalia of social and domestic ritual in strange ways, is perfectly suited to the gallery's rooms, which are classically proportioned and detailed domestic spaces.
There is a macabre element to O'Brien's sculptures that is all the more effective for catching us unawares. Her use of neutral or benign objects and materials lulls us into a false sense of security, and part of the overall thrust of what she is about is the implication that a sense of security is always false. She has spent time living and working in Poland, and her imagination is informed by gothic elements, by folk tale horrors from dark forests.
The Demise features a mass of spoons arrayed on the wall, each holding a faceless (bar one?) watch. As with the vacant watch cases, the flattened spoons hint at futility, the pointlessness of lives measured out in daily ritual. This is not to pin down the piece in terms of one exclusive meaning. Part of the appeal of O'Brien's sculpture is its openness to interpretation. You could read The Demise as implying a moral: we consume our time, our lives, in the routines that we inherit, construct or cling to. But that is not the end of it; it is just one line of interpretation.
Several works function as portraits. The Secret, a doll's head within an ornate architectural construction, is a brilliant inversion: the prized secret contains, and embellishes, the head, rather than vice versa. More cruelly, Red Chillies serves up a head cracked open like an egg; and for all its apparent reductionism, Headless Chicken is a clever, multi-layered figure.
Small Steps, at the Temple Bar Gallery, is a group exhibition with a complex curatorial genesis, the upshot of which is that the show is an amalgam of several previously separate exhibitions originally organised as part of an Irish arts festival in the US. While there is no thematic link, there are one or two oblique hints that the work might undercut received notions of Ireland and Irishness. The work doesn't particularly do that, but nor does it seem to set out to do it - though admittedly Locky Morris's contribution was impossible to assess as it was unfortunately closed down for technical reasons.
Orla Ryan and Maoliosa Boyle collaborate on a relaxed, sprawling installation, the best component of which is a handwritten shaggy-dog story about their half-hearted attempt to create a work about the Northern woman who stymied the development of a shopping centre in her home town by refusing to sell part of her back garden to the developers. What sparked Ryan and Boyle's curiosity was the fact that the garden in question seemed to be nothing more than a strip of grass, rather than, despite the proselytising efforts of umpteen make-over programmes, a showpiece of inspired planting and design.
The best touch is their dawning suspicion, as they eat chips in a dismal café close to the woman's home, having failed to interview her, that maybe what the town really needs is a new shopping mall. Their piece seems to be about failing: their own failure echoes the failures on several levels, public and personal, referred to throughout.
Mary Mcintyre's large format colour photographs depict deserted functional, communal interiors. Here there are views of what looks like a gymnasium-cum-community hall and a bank.
Devoid of their inhabitants and the activities to which they are, perhaps in a rough and ready way, devoted, Mcintyre's interiors usually have an uncomfortable, maladroit quality.
Form doesn't so much follow function as helplessly acquiesce in it. The many and varied points of contact between institutions and individuals are often abrasive, makeshift and dingy, but even when Mcintyre depicts more salubrious environments there is still a simmering unease. Her work comes across best in self-contained, solo shows, and it may also be suited to publication.
Conor McFeely's casual installation marshals a range of workaday objects and materials. It draws you in, and its easy-going, improvisational manner simultaneously suggests and undercuts the possibility of a cumulative significance. It is ultimately non-committal, but there is something engaging about the choice of elements and the almost musical sense of momentum. Susan Philipsz is that relative rarity, a sound artist. Relying on songs, and her own voice in a variety of contexts, she has in the past explored the way we hear and respond to music. Here, the title of her piece implies that she is quoting a soundtrack fragment from The Battle of Algiers, conjuring up a huge physical presence.
THE great German novelist Günter Grass is 75 this year, and to mark the event the Goethe Institut has organised a documentary exhibition About Drawing and Writing, exploring his sculptural and graphic work in the context of his writing. Perhaps, given his productivity as a writer, the surprise is that he has to his credit a formidable body of such work. One of the fascinating things about the show, at the Central Library, is that it demonstrates how his graphic work really feeds his writing, with several examples of hybrid prose-calligraphy-image pieces.
He also designed an outstanding series of jackets for his own work. A capable carver, he was apprenticed as a stone mason, but as a visual artist he is most comfortable as a draughtsman and printmaker. He is aligned with a strong German tradition extending back as far as Albrecht Dürer and encompassing the jaundiced style of virtuoso Horst Jenssen, who died in 1995. The pity about the show is its documentary form. It would have been good to see a real exhibition of Grass's sculptures, drawings and prints.
Irregularities by Kathlyn O'Brien, Paul Kane Gallery until January 19th (01-6703141); Small Steps, Temple Bar Gallery until January 14th (01-6710073); and Günter Grass: About Drawing and Writing, Central Library, IlacCentre until January 31st (01-8734333)
