C110 article

Dublin: Marking the Underpass at the Vaults

Louisa Sloan: Okayleft, video still; courtesy Fire Station Artists Studios

The Fire Station Studio artists understand that the advantages of staging an exhibition in a bar extend beyond the opening-night festivities. Marking the underpass, which ran at the Vaults in Dublin through September, refused to passively occupy designated exhibition space. Closely attuned to the crypt-like setting of the Vaults, the governing approach of the exhibition is best described as archaeological or anthropological. Working on as well as in the venue, the nine artists set about negotiating the Vaults as both a physical and a cultural space.

If this was the exhibition brief it was kept refreshingly open-ended. A wide range of media, approaches and interests were brought to bear on the venue. Video was the preferred medium for exploring the social rituals that take place within a bar. Installation-based work stole the show, setting itself the admittedly easier task of using the interior of the venue as a cultural readymade. Mark Garry's sculptural occupation of a potted plant and Alan Phelan's arming of the Vault's imitation Medieval statues with shields cut from car bonnets, teamed up to comment on the mash of styles and signs within the venue and the world beyond its walls.

The Vaults' proximity to Connolly Station was often invoked to connect these interior and exterior realms. Louisa Sloan's video uses the train journey to Belfast to address the cultural differences separating communities. Róisín Lewis' charcoal drawings of the landscape seen through the window of a moving train represent a quest for personal fulfilment through travel and escape, a concept perfectly captured in Rhona Byrne's whimsical photographic images of the iconic hobo's bag on a stick. Sloan and Lewis refigure the physical train journey as a wider metaphor for moving through and across the contemporary world. Both works address

the processes of making art very distinctly in the here and now, a concept that underpins the entire exhibition.

The underpass was certainly 'marked'. Very few other bars were playing video art on multiple plasma screens for two hours each night. Yet this was no hostile artistic takeover of the venue. With its emphasis on the negotiation of cultural codes and signs, the exhibition allowed itself to be subsumed within the very spaces it explored. The relationships between art, the contexts in which it operates, and the communities it addresses both informed much of the work on display and provided the exhibition's animating dynamic.

Aaron Lister is an arts writer from New Zealand, currently based in Dublin.

Marking the Underpass, The Vaults, Irish Financial Services Centre, Dublin, September / October 2004

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp.64
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