CIRCA 111 review

Belfast: Thinking of Ideas at Golden Thread Gallery

Alan Phelan: Arklow racers, mounted backlit duratran on shelf; courtesy Golden Thread Gallery

Thinking of Ideas presents a broad spectrum of work, each one an appetiser to the respective individual artist’s practice (execution). Many of the works function as samples for the overall creative processes these artists are engaged in, some of which are familiar, some unfamiliar and others overfamiliar.

What the show achieves overall is the foregrounding of the works’ objecthood. The absence of soundclash (the bane of the contemporary art experience) and video projection allows the wallmounted and sculptural object pre-eminence. This is a show that therefore makes sense in and of the gallery’s white-cube environment. Given that video, sound and sculptural installation often implies an effacement or superseding of the gallery space (and usually in the case of photography the erasure of immediate context is achieved by drawing the viewer through an illusory window in the architectural space), this focus on the object is not as common as might be supposed.

Ian Charlesworth and Martina Corry’s trademark techniques encapsulate this quality of the overall show most succinctly. Corry’s interventions on photographic paper and Charlesworth’s residual smoke patterns call attention to the objecthood of the apparently two-dimensional. In revealing representation as presentation, the sculptural dimension of mark-making is also revealed. Charlesworth’s work is most resolved in this respect, Corry’s most paradoxical.

Willie McKeown’s two works are comparable to but distinct from the above. The diaphanous palette employed is certainly a window into a world of breathless tonality, but the pictures are also elegant sculptural slices on the gallery wall. The use of a thin black border around the central colour-field outlines and demarcates this dual nature.

Alan Phelan’s Arklow racers is more formally intriguing, but also problematic. The mounted duratran is backlit by the lightbox-cum-shelf on which it sits. The measured presentation makes for a sculpturally gorgeous little work which, however, exacerbates the crisp banality of the image in contrast. If gallery-based photography often suffers from ennui, being decontextualised to pointlessness, the attempt to circumvent this may in fact result in highlighting it. If this is so then Phelan’s is a worthy attempt.

Nearby, three of Brian Kennedy’s Golden egg photos also seem marooned. Their origins in a process of voyage suggest that a more co-relational and less isolated context and scale might provide a more integrated outcome. Echo, his collaboration with Ciarán Carson, is more satisfying in this regard. Aisling O’Beirn’s Golden Mile stories, mugs with incidentally political reminiscences printed on them, is the strongest of her selected works. Again it begs to be encountered elsewhere, in the canteen or café, woven back into the social fabric. All the more so given the attempt to represent the wry Belfast sensibility, with its combined matter-of-factness, sense of absurdity, self-parody and submerged gallows humour.

Gary Shaw and Lisa Malone’s works display the most directly creative thinking and technique in the show. Shaw’s works on paper, Paper clips in love and What about the rest of the fleet, mounted on the first wall inside the space, shake with dynamic colour and compositional movement. His works on canvas lack this energy and immediacy, being more laboured and sequential. Malone’s three Open exit etchings are technically unassuming while possessed of a combined tragedy and whimsy. As with her installation and sculptural works elsewhere, the work’s fun naïvety conceals a powerful sense of understatement.

Niamh McCann’s Suspension employs a more staged and camp sense of humour, in this case a literal gallows humour. The movie cliché of dangling legs indicating the aftermath of suicide or lynching is placed centre stage in this sixty-second looped video. The comic effect of the image is curious, given that the hanged corpse, and particularly the face, is a profoundly debased and abject spectacle.

At opposite ends of the spectrum are Allan Hughes and Una Walker. Hughes’ soundworks are here compiled on a six-hour MP3 disk. The crafted sonic experiments and compositions are the epitome of process as outcome and evidence the development of his work through intricate craft from a looser associative conceptualism. Walker’s two works, Bell Gallery and Arts Council Gallery, are highly conceptual in an almost retro style. The two clear perspex panels are emblazoned with vinyl text: the gallery name, street name, and date indicating the closure of the respective galleries due to bombing. Most pleasing is the configuration of the text with its shadow (due to panels being mounted out from the wall), suggesting that if materiality and eventhood are inseparable they are nonetheless configured with their own abstraction in relations.

Isabel Nolan is the one artist whose work exhibits a developed internal relationship, thus occupying its own territory rather than referencing alongside or elsewhere. The juxtaposition of various materials brings out the strengths in each, particularly the sublimely simple pinnacle Tender and the tragically amusing keystone Towel dog. The works are fragile, fun and evocative - reserved and dramatic in one.

om lekha

Thinking of Ideas, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, November - December 2004

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.74–75

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