CIRCA 111 review

Boyle: Trunk Show at King House

Anna McLeod: Temporary locations; courtesy Visual Leitrim

The idea behind Trunk Show is that it is a travelling show that will include a new trunk of artwork from each location it visits and that all artwork must be able to fit into its trunk for its onward journeys. This version of the show was built around an Irish and an American trunk that were curated by Cliodhna Shaffrey and Ann Shostrom. In Boyle, Trunk Show was something like a moment at a customs checkpoint when travellers were asked to open their bags to check for illegal contents and instead of contraband items, the customs officer found an array of inexplicable souvenirs from the artist travellers.

Some of the bizarre souvenirs that float to the surface of this show are Stephen Brandes’ Postcards from an atrocity - tourist’s guide to Eastern and Central Europe, and Stacy Levy’s Bottled water from sources ranging from snow to fish-tank water. Djeribi’s Lines of going map daily routines on the heart-side of five shirts and Dominick Stevens’ A place to think reveals an antidote to busyness in the form of a calm interior space similar to the waiting and thinking spaces one finds while in transit.

Dominick Stevens: A place to think, mixed media,2004; courtesy Visual Leitrim

James Thurman’s Tectonic plate 03-1222C; courtesy Visual Leitrim

Physical, psychological and cultural relocation were addressed throughout the exhibition. Noel Molloy’s work focuses on genetics in the broad context of cultural diversity while Susanne Anker’s Cibachrome chromosome, showing sets of steel chromosome pairs rising out of a trunk, makes reference to genetic mapping and the contentious issue of re-mapping the human body. Two works deserving of particular attention were James Thurman’s Tectonic plate 03-1222C, which was a smooth and concave plate fashioned from the hollowed-out circular centre of an atlas, and Anna McLeod’s inconceivably dense mapped-network, Temporary locations, on a scale of 1:infinity with stellar-constellation-imprinted magnifying glass. One of the highlights of this show was a superb video, Barnstorm, by an American artists’ collective. Its high-speed graffiti was an inspired investigation of the simplicities and complexities of our busily tangled globalised and trans-cultural societies.

If this show is approached with the expectation of finding the order of the museum, the crux of the show, i.e. the concept of being in transit, will have been overlooked. The show united into an uncatalogued lost-and-found department by organising the work so that unnamed psychological maps from a Vietnam veteran lie beside unclaimed templates for paper aeroplanes. The jagged edges about this show that might have irritated some viewers were the same aspects that recreated the charged ether of the artist as traveller.

Regina Gleeson is a writer on art and technology.

Trunk Show, King House, Boyle County Roscommon, 10-16 December 2004

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.84–85

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