C105 review

Belfast: One Place Twice at Golden Thread

Following an invitation from the Sculpture Society of Ireland to profile the work of six emerging artists from the North and South of the island, Declan Long and Brian Kennedy curated the exhibition One Place Twice in Belfast's Golden Thread Gallery, 28 June - 5 July of this year.

Upon entering the space, the audience was met with a large video projection showing a series of stunts, including a man driving across stage in a homemade hovercraft, then powering himself on rollerskates with the aid of a fire extinguisher. Tim Lloyd's Tales of loco-motion, 2003, reminded me of the demonstrations my highly enthusiastic physics teacher would devise to retain the interest of a pubescent mob, demonstrating as they did principles such as the conservation of energy - whereby matter cannot be created or destroyed - and the law of gravity - everything that goes up... But Llyod's incidents were also not a million miles from the kamikaze antics of the Jackass television program, and in this sense their comedy was compounded by an overtone of thrill-seeking boredom best described as ambulance chasing.

Llyod's projection of lemons being wired up, to indicate the potential of their chemical energy to become electrical energy and thereby fuel LED's, confirmed the interplay of art, science, and spectacle. At the theatrical high point of Low voltage, 2003, the fruits powered their own stage lighting which, when the background light was switched to UV, showed the fruit in a strangely intimate light. The emergent comedy conveyed a more subtle exploration of the way in which humans are directed by a desire for story and event, and may focus on virtually anything for it.

Nearby the vivid reds and flesh tones of Geraldine Ross's photographic prints Mouth, 2003, resembled anatomy studies of vaginas, or perhaps open wounds. When nearer still, an unlikely flower or fruit-like beauty emerged from the piece of liver held in a mouth, seen sideways, open to varying extents. The meat's folds and furls, the drip of blood and the slight facial hairs conjured up studies hybridising botany and gynaecology. Not least because of the choice of offal, the images questioned the values attributed to the female body, embracing the issue of a sex gaze that may border on the surgical or consumptive. Embracing it, but muted by it.

At the opening, Ross made a short performance in which she wrapped more liver in a long strip of fabric, knotted together from smaller ones. She then placed the umbilical cord through a hole in a chair and into her vagina, to create - when she held the other extremity in her hand - a circuit, linking her work to Carolee Schneeman's Meat joy and Interior scroll.

Resting on a free-standing block, Ciara Healy's Rendered still, 2003, series of butterflies made of transparent blue plastic prompted a contemplation of our pathological admiration of archives, and the bind that so much seeing - in terms of the classical pursuit of knowledge - implies death. Three frames on a wall displayed more of the creatures in flight formations, against lined and graph paper, conveying our attempts to correspond with, calibrate and restrain nature. Their migration reflected the fact that collections are projections of desire, and the text on some of the forms, suggesting the material was recuperated, redirected the detachment of the archival gaze, converting it into a transformation of something from the everyday.

Suspended in the approximate centre of the space - and the Gallery's columns made it hard to discern, forcing the eye to work, wander and compose - hung a sword, directly above a solid wooden chair, in aimnín's Or be silent, 2003. The unspoken invitation was to put yourself in Damocles' shoes. Upon doing so, there arose an uneasy sense of tempting fate, as the blade hung patiently, mere inches above the skull. The installation offered a moment of trans-fixion in the busy space, at once quietening the mind and arousing the sense of the myth and matter of thresholds. Bound in the vertigo of looking upwards, the metal tip threatened to slice through the duality of the eyes. Emerging from the experience of the chair, the text 'Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent', was incidentally visible on a ceiling girder.

Helen Sharp's glitter ball dazzled across a wall reading, in red spray paint, 'Schizo disco, All welcome'. Two swans with their necks entwined sat on a bed of books and looked on, whilst behind them a hanging yellow bulb glowed over a school-type desk and a chair. A magical crystal chandelier promised glamour, and cast its light across a metal sheet displaying the acid-etched message 'What's for you will not pass you by'. The whole installation was animated by an eclectic soundtrack, including jazz and country music. The resultant ambience unsettled the system of authoritative knowledge, and dispersed the segregation of high and low culture, as the institutions of the nightclub/school/natural history museum/ballroom overlapped. Casual realism part IV - this is not a swansong, 2003, develops the school of sensory thought Sharp 'discovered' upon mis-reading the term 'causal realism' in a philosophy handbook. In contrast to the drive to decodify, there was an emphasis on the uncanniness of unusually juxtaposed objects, and the pleasure of embracing the enlightenment arising from ambiguity.

Louisa Sloan presented two video projections of horses named Julius and Caesar, 2002, staring out over stable doors. The divide between them dissolved as their heads crossed over at one point into the others frame. The shift from enclosure to the realisation of common situation, seen from different vantage points, could be a metaphor for the way in which the group exhibition functioned as a whole. The variations of rhythm and media, animated by the navigation of the space's architecture, offered an encounter suggesting that beyond taxonomy - dividing through naming - is the reality of mataxis - worlds participating within worlds. Kennedy's text in the exhibition publication - which explores the similar challenges young artists face - and the catalogue's form - brochures on each artist, with an overview essay by Long, combined in a wallet - resonate this view.

Julie Bacon is an artist, writer and researcher; she co-edits the online art journal www.thearchivist.net.

One Place Twice, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, June/July 2003

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