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CIRCA 113 review
Limerick: Tom Molloy at Limerick City Gallery of Art
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Tom Molloy: from Allegiance (from series of fifty individual pencil drawings of fifty embroidered stars from one U.S. flag), 2004, 24 x 35 cm, pencil on paper ; courtesy Rubicon Gallery
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Yo lo vi, Tom Molloy's current exhibition at Limerick City Gallery of Art, quietly interferes with presentations of America as a superpower, using the poetry of pencil to redirect attention toward the overlooked and understated.
Borrowing the title for this exhibition from Goya's Disasters of war series of prints, ('Yo lo vi' translates as 'I saw it'), Molloy questions the credibility of the artist's observational claim in relation to contemporary exercises in warfare. Bearing 'eye witness' to television coverage, the press and online media, Molloy acknowledges a filtered distance and a difference in the seeing and comprehension of events.
Dead Texans depicts one hundred miniature portraits of sons of somebodies; The boy next door; The joker, The black, The white, The guilty, The innocent, united in a common cause of death - death by State decree. Equipped with this knowledge, it is difficult to resist the temptation to conjure a crime to fit the offender. Like knitted Bastille records, Molloy registers the faces of the executed in a patchwork of drawings, painstakingly re-granting the subjects of the prison mugshots (from which these works are derived) something of their stolen humanness.
This intimacy is removed when the machine takes over to generate multiples for Pilots, a series of photocopies of nineteen hijackers reproduced to match the number of people confirmed killed in the 11 September bombings on the World Trade Centre, mounted in grid formation on the back wall of the south gallery. Pilots, one suspects, are also guilty until proven otherwise. Viewing this work is something of a torture itself; the believability of the assertion, "I saw it," again called into question as one is forced to admit the possibility of perceptual tricks. The same faces are, or appear to be, cropping up everywhere, while others are obscured and distorted by a trailing after-image. Like an optical illusion, they morph into blobs of black, while the stark white spaces in between scream for recognition - what one sees, now a blur; what one saw, unsubstantiated.
And children are not protected from some knowledge of war. The little yellow uniformed watercolour soldiers of Let's roll playfully repeat a limited repertoire of manoeuvres around three walls of the gallery: lob a grenade, carry a gun (various positions), occasionally breaking up the rhythm with an improvisation on the theme: a different arc of a bomb-throwing arm, a quaint angling of the weapon. This work, paraded around the walls at a child's eye level, imparts a serious reminder that tiny eyes are watching too, and the vocabulary of war is part of the vocabulary of childhood.
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Top and above: Tom Molloy: Pilots, 2005, photocopies, overall size 175 x 534 cm (2996 small photocopies on black paper repeatedly depicting the nineteen pilots from the four planes used on 11 September 2001, glued in a large grid patterns; 2996 refers to the number of people officially killed on that day excluding the hijackers); courtesy Rubicon Gallery (Top: installation shot; above: detail)
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Molloy invites the visitor to pause and consider for a moment the possibility that silver linings may be, not just tarnished, but rotten to the core. Clouds 1-10 almost encloses the viewer in lyrical delusion: benign wads of cumulus cloud, gracefully floating across the sky. Research reveals, however, that these are representations of a deadly froth, abstracts from images of postexplosion plumes ten minutes after the detonation of an atomic bomb on a US test site in the Marshall Islands in 1952.
The probing of the undiscussed, the unmentioned, and a querying of faith in appearances (most particularly in the might of America), continues with Molloy's skilful wielding of the pencil in Allegiance. The fifty graphite-woven stars, framed and exhibited in the same configuration as the stars on 'Old Glory', here and there confess a frailty, expose a tiny crack in the facade, (some stars are ever-so-slightly unfurling at a tip...) And, in a sense, this work perhaps serves to summarise this recurring theme in Yo lo vi - a gentle exhibition of the frailties of perception and memory and the dangers of believing opinion based on such fallible knowledge.
Ciara Finnegan is an artist based in Limerick.
Tom Molloy: Yo lo vi, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, June - July 2005
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