C105 Review

Blanchardstown: Rita Jokiranta at Draíocht

Rita Jokiranta: from Temporary Diaries, 2003, colour photograph, courtesy Draíocht Arts Centre

From many positions Rita Jokiranta's large unframed images behave as mirrors portraying oneself in the gallery. The six works titled Temporary diaries ýre rural landscapes taken late during overcast days. One is that of a turning in a country road, another is of shallow waves coming into shore. There is a view of a straight and empty road at dusk centred in the frame, which disappears toward a thin horizon defined by a distant town's lights or perhaps those surrounded by an airport, and a haunting portrait of a woodland area.

The inherent stillness within these landscapes is partly to do with their grey-blue tone - a condition of a dominant overcast climate as well as a result of the printing process. The high-gloss finish on the prints reflecting the daylight in the gallery meant that immediate recognition of the work was difficult: with each came a faint reminder of something familiar but nothing specific, suggesting it is intentional that upon contact, these works appear drained of emotion. The silence rendered to situations that are intrinsically spaces where movement takes place is mysterious. For it is in eliminating the surroundings that Jokiranta discredits any extended narrative in favour of presenting conundrums for the viewer about our relation to the landscape. On the one hand, roadways, forests and the sea are significant elements of the countryside - 'known' to us through our experience of driving through or to or by way of the landscape as it is inscribed to us through excessive mediation. However, for the large majority of us these are, in a 'traditional sense', peripheral realities, and here they seem to perform as the 'lost subject stalled beyond the screen'.

This implication seems to be substantiated through the formulation of Temporary diaries in so far as their format and features are like those of the picture postcard. After all, we use postcards to promote and market the traditional and idyllic notions of 'place' as well as to remind people of where we have travelled.

The treatment is quite different in Filling the silence 2003, although the situation is still the rural landscape. Three images of a road junction have been taken from fractionally differing positions and printed in fractionally different sizes side by side on a strip of high-gloss photographic paper. The sequence is spectacularly cinematic. Its format almost denies the photograph in favour of the wide screen. The un-mounted glossy paper seems to deliberately float on the wall. The images were shot with a wide lens from the grassy patch between the slip road and the main road. The camera was low down. There is nowhere for the eye to stop here, the eye moves across from left to right or right to left, as it would be doing if driving in a car. One might also suggests a linkage with the cinematic in its reminiscence of the splintering assault on spatial distortion, which we are rapidly becoming familiar with in large-budget movies. What also lingers within the triple composition of Filling the silence is a figurative element through which one could interpret the slip road meeting the main road as two open legs.

Pretending Happiness, 2003, is two arrangements of colour images that are 'lighter' in tone than Temporary diaries. Numbers one to four presents rows of luggage trolleys inside an airport terminal, a couple alone in a restaurant, a red bedroom reflected in a mirror and a continental landscape. Mirrors and entrances frame these scenes that together suggest that the narrative is the relation between the couple. In numbers five to sixteen, square format and using the narrow lens, one of the twelve images is a painted gable wall. Others are a radiator's connection to its water supplies, a public lavatory, venetian blinds, a cigarette burn in a sofa cushion and yellow chrysanthemums in a pot before a blue-painted kitchen wall. The work outlines the fabrics we use to furnish our everyday living spaces, surfaces that are at times worn and at times prohibit a clear sense of one's own historic relation to things; simply echoing the enormity

of the 'spaces' of the city. The placement of Pretending happiness at a distance from the other works and immediately across from the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre is strategic and productively playful, given that this is where we find a similar surface immediacy portrayed in a similar fashion.

What is of particular interest in the juxtaposition of Temporary diaries, the spectacular splintered eye of Filling the silence, and Pretending happiness is how, through our own processes of engagement, reception and registration we begin an encounter with the differing realities inhabited in our day-to-day identification to place. And how, through these glimpses, we are able momentarily to acknowledge some of the separation existing between a clear understanding of a relation to place as an organised structure, and the place as it is presented to us in the context of the event - say, for example, the cinema. It seems poignant that the first thing one notices about Rita Jokiranta's large unframed images at the Draiocht is their likeness to mirrors.

Emma Donaldson is an artist living in London and Ireland.

Rita Jokiranta, Temporary Diaries, Draiocht, July 2003

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