'Eurojet Futures' offers the chance to see the works of seven of our brightest and best young artists, writes Aidan Dunne
In his book about British art in the 1990s, Julian Stallabrass coined the term "high art lite". He was referring to the way Brit Art sacrificed so much for the sake of popular success, the way it seemed to deal in profundities but actually skimmed the surface, the way ironic detachment was the only pose in town.
The term comes to mind regarding Eurojet Futures 03, not because the seven artists included are taking the Brit Art route, but because there is a noticeable lightness, even buoyancy, throughout the show - though there is no unanimity in terms of form or content.
Eurojet Futures is a series of annual exhibitions designed to showcase the work of Irish artists who are not quite newcomers, but people who are just beginning to make an impact.
This, the show's third year, was originally envisaged as the last in the series, but the sponsor has decided to commit to another two years. The sole selector is RHA director Pat Murphy and each year he chooses work by seven artists from shows during the preceding 12 months.
There may not be a unanimity to the show, but there is a recurrent concern with identity and the representation of identity, and much of the art is recognisably trying to negotiate a new space for itself, which is a good thing.
None more so than Mark Garry. He has a significant track record, if more as a curator-artist than as an artist per se. Over the past few years he, in a sense, has been shadowing the Irish art scene, maintaining a spirited, innovative but determinedly alternative presence, by-passing as much as possible the conventional commercial gallery and Arts Council subsidy route.
What he shows here is conceptually very interesting: a set of three portraits. Rather than being representational likenesses of the three brothers who are the portrait subjects, he offers idiosyncratic but consistent symbolic representations of sections of a profiling test applied to the three in Chicago in 1980. What we get are codified accounts of varying difference rendered in terms of an arbitrary but oddly engaging set of processes, objects, patterns and images. It's like trying to decipher the Rosetta Stone. We can see the relationships and variations without knowing the significance. All of which is surprisingly thought-provoking.
Neva Elliott has built up a significant body of work exploring aspects of what might be called, if this were a thesis, the commodification of selfhood in capitalist culture. All About Me is an ingenious and revealing piece. Numerous personal ads pages from newspapers fill an entire wall. The artist has gone through then armed with felt-tipped pens, not with the aim of finding the ideal mate but with finding her ideal of self. She has methodically excised every word that doesn't apply, or that she wouldn't apply, to herself, and the result is a kind of vast, demented self-portrait in personal ad speak.
There is an obsessive, and a self- obsessive quality to the piece that is characteristic of most of her work. Vast therapeutic industries exist to persuade us that our perceived inadequacies can be corrected. Elliott, who has a working vending machine dispensing beautiful pastiche Self Help and Self-Assessment pharmaceuticals, doesn't simply satirise gullible consumers or grasping corporations. Underlying her pieces' awareness of humanity's limitless selfishness, there is real feeling for mysterious, obsessive, vulnerable and fragile selves.
The teenage girls in Gemma Browne's series of portrait heads, Sugar Coated, have a startling, slightly eerie uniformity. Visually, apart from more approximate similarities, it has a lot to do with the standard wide-eyed stare that meets our gaze in every image. They all aspire to the same ideal of appearance, something that immediately suggests implications about the tyranny of cultural stereotypes and the relentless pressure to conform.
Browne doesn't force the issue in any particular direction. Certainly her subjects don't come across as victims - they look quite formidable and assured. Stylistically, she is somewhere between Karen Kilimnick and Marlene Dumas, but doesn't quite have the élan or facility of the latter. Yet Sugar Coated works, and it will be interesting to see what she does next.
Obsessive patterns of behaviour surface again in Gail O'Reilly's untitled video. A blurry black-and-white affair, it presents us, in close-up, with a succession of non-sequential actions and events in a domestic setting. There is a retrospective, uncanny, maybe even fetishistic quality to the whole thing, that recalls Susan McWilliams's atmospheric film and video work. And overall, despite nothing like narrative cohesion or progression emerges, there is an abiding mood.
To say, as a catalogue note does, that "the work frustrates our need for meaning" sounds suspiciously like a cop-out.
Linda Quinlan's sculpture and video work is strange. It consists of a sculptural installation evocative of a laboratory cum operating theatre, plus a video detailing - without explaining - what all this stuff might be used for. It's obsessive and convincing, recalling Matthew Barney's Cremaster films.
Jeanette Doyle takes several conventional modes of representation in painting and drawing and pushes them in various ways. In one case she isolates still-life subjects, ordinary kitchen utensils, makes drawing of them in marker on corrugated cardboard and frames them with galvanised tin sheets. There's something about utility going on here, but the main point of her approach seems to be to introduce a problematic element into our habitual way of reading images.
Finally, Romek Delimata, who works in a very hands-on way with technology, came up with the ideal project - in an extremely unlikely example of a "let's put the show on here in the barn" approach, he proposed installing the flight cabin of a Boeing 747, complete with flight simulator, in the gallery. Thus, you can find yourself in the surprisingly cramped confines of the cockpit, bringing in a 747 for a landing on a runaway that looks alarmingly small in the distance.
What more could you ask for at a Eurojet show?
Eurojet Futures 03 is at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery until August 24th (01-6612558)