CIRCA 111 review

Dublin: Mark Garry at the Workroom

Mark Garry: I’d Rather Dance with You, 2005, installation shot; courtesy the artist

The first solo show of Venice Biennale-selected Mark Garry continues the artist’s investigations into physical space, investigations which have their own interesting artistic and philosophical pedigree. Vito Acconci has said that museums and galleries are constructed according to the way in which we stand in front of the art object, and Martin Heidegger1 describes how space itself is altered by the artworks within it. Meanwhile, both Marcel Duchamp (Mile of string,1928), and Patrick Ireland (Rope drawing series, 1980s) have used lengths of fibre to demonstrate the planes and tensions inherent in the seemingly empty areas of the gallery. Garry’s installation further plays with these ideas, using colourful lines looping through centre-space to underline the experiential qualities of that area in which we stand in front of these artworks; a void which fills up with our own associations, altering how the work is seen and understood. At the Workroom, abstract shapes like psychedelic blobs and birds of paradise dance around the walls, with a light brightness and a playfulness which momentarily intrigues before flitting on.

Gemma Tipton is a writer on art and architecture, and editor of CONTEXTS magazine.

1Vito Acconci, interviewed by the author, 11 May 2002; Martin Heidegger, Art and space, quoted in Rethinking Architecture, ed. Neil Leach, Routledge, London 1997, p. 121

Mark Garry: I’d Rather Dance with You, The Workroom, Dublin, January 2005

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.77

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