There is a strong autobiographical vein running through much of the work of American sculptor, Keith Edmier, (currently showing at the Douglas Hyde Gallery). Singularly so in the case of a retrospective portrait figure of his mother. It's called Beverly Edmier 1967. The significance of the date is that it's the year of Keith's birth. And he's there in the sculpture, in the form of a foetus, visible through the transparent wall of his mother's stomach.
Garbed in a pink Chanel suit, modelled on the one worn by Jackie Kennedy on the day her husband was assassinated, Beverly Edmier is made very realistically except for one detail: she is finished in a strange, livid pink plastic, a material to which her son is notably partial. The combination of meticulously naturalistic imagery and shocking pink means that the figure seems both familiar and strange. It's an effect central to Edmier's work. Sometimes he goes to extraordinary lengths in pursuit of realism. To make a sculpture of a bunch of roses, he dissected the flowers and made casts from the stems, leaves and petals, then painstakingly reassembled the constituent parts. But again, the flowers, except for some detailing on the petals, are an unnatural pink.
The roses are not only a typical Mother's Day bouquet, they're also a replica of the one held by Jackie Kennedy on the day of her husband's death. Does Edmier have a Jackie O fixation? Not exactly. What fascinates him is her status as an icon of her time. Everywhere in his work you see the same obsessive reconstruction of images from the past, usually his past. Each piece accumulates details and references as it is formed, lending it a wider relevance, so that it becomes a meditation on individual and collective memory. Over in a corner of the gallery there's a startling monument to the first girl he remembers having a crush on in junior school. Jill Peters is finished in white plastic, dressed in white and stands on a mound of snow, but she wears a blond wig. The details are significant: it's a Farrah Fawcett hairstyle, the shoes refer to a contemporary fad for ergonomically sound brogues, and if you get close enough to trace the scuff marks in the snow you'll find a tenuous allusion to Dorothy clicking her heels together in The Wizard of Oz. This latter because Edmier began to think of her as a young female protagonist like Dorothy or Alice.
What's striking about all the autobiographical material is its ordinariness. Edmier describes his background as being "typically Midwestern middle class". He and his sister were brought up in Chicago in your standard nuclear family: parents, two kids, comfortably off. Though he did depart from the conventional script when he quit art college in California before graduating. Instead, he went to work in film. His job was in special effects, doing outlandish make-up, making realistic looking props and scary monsters.
It was lucrative, and he hoped that he could devote half his time to it and give the rest to his own work. After a few years he realised that wasn't going to happen and he made the brave decision to move to New York and be an artist. When he began he still carried the baggage of art school. That is to say, he thought he'd be doing conceptual art. But the climate had shifted and he found that it was possible to make much more personal work. Looking at his sculpture now, it seems that his experience in special effects has been particularly significant. He feels there's also another, rather less obvious influence, and that is a part-time job he had as a teenager, in a dental lab, where he learned some of the technical procedures he uses now. Once he says it, you can see it immediately. The slightly uncomfortable quality, the bright pink colour. It's a ready-made thesis topic for some student in the future: Dental techniques and materials in the sculpture of Keith Edmier.
The oddest piece in the show is the most straightforward: a life-size model of a giant water lily, Victoria Amazonica. It particularly interested him because it's a night-blooming plant with a complicated sex life. While its botanical credentials may be quite in order, with its spiky stem rendered in pink, and out of its watery habitat, it is quite animal-like, as if it's related to the giant flower that develops a taste for human flesh in the bizarre horror spoof, The Little Shop of Horrors.
The expansive lily leaf is situated at an average eye level. In reality it floats, therefore eye level equals water level, and the undulating stems we see are underwater. Edmier says that a serendipitous collaboration with stunt motorcyclist Evel Knievel led to this watery dimension in his work. One of his early pieces consisted of a photograph of an Evel Knievel doll - another memory from childhood - posed before a postcard of the Grand Canyon. When he was invited to make an exhibition in Tampa, Florida, he happened to hear that Knievel lived nearby, and he thought he might get the real life Knievel to pose for a similar photograph. In the event, Knievel wasn't at all interested, but he was keen on a more ambitious collaboration. He and Edmier came up with the idea for an as yet unrealised public monument to the rider, using the shape of the landmark fountain at Caesar's Palace in Los Vegas, the scene of his first major jump. A drawing of the proposed monument is included in the show.
The water lily piece, together with schematic models of snow crystals that embellish the gallery's windows, suggest concerns beyond the autobiographical, but otherwise Edmier's work combines two contemporary trends: the navel-gazing that characterises a great deal of art by young Americans, and a vogue for life-like sculptural effects. He is an interesting, accessible and engaging artist, and, despite a certain mood of austerity that stems from the sparse lay-out, the exhibition is very user-friendly.
Short Circuit is a touring group show of work by the co-operative Backwater Artists Group, based in Cork. Rather than tour a show featuring a token piece by each member of the group, they have taken the enlightened step of showing a more rounded body of work by just some members at each venue, so everyone gets reasonable exposure and each venue gets a new show. Meanwhile all the artists are represented in a general purpose catalogue.
Featuring just five artists, the current show, in the Temple Bar Atrium, works very well. Eilis Ni Fhaolain's Superwoman carved and painted wood sculptures are an attractive amalgam of traditional means and humorous, irreverent commentary. They have something in common with the work of Janet Mullarney. There's humour as well in the work of the other sculptor, Ray Lawlor, who makes witty, improvised constructions of found and assembled objects.
Kevin Blomley shows a suite of bright little paintings. Robust and sharp, they never become contrived or precious. Frances Murphy's translucent glass pieces, mounted on painted wood panels, adapt the visual language of religious ritual and symbolism to a personal iconography. Megan Eustace's collaged paintings have a casual air. Subtle and oblique, they are quietly compelling, obsessive acts of looking.
Keith Edmier's sculptures can be seen at the Douglas Hyde Gallery until September 26th.
