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CIRCA 113 review
Dublin: Eurojet Futures at Royal Hibernian Academy
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Nevan Lahart: Whiter than white sliced gama steak slave sandwich, 2005, installation shot, Royal Hibernian Academy; courtesy the artist
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In the largest room upstairs in the Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallagher Gallery, the work of twenty-seven artists comprised Eurojet Futures - An Anthology of Emerging Art from Ireland. Since 2001, the sponsorship of Eurojet has overseen a series of annual exhibitions selected by Patrick T. Murphy, Director of the Gallagher Galleries, with the explicit intention of presenting newer artists around whom there was already a gathering critical consensus. In various catalogue forewords, Murphy thanks his colleagues from towns and cities around the country, thus acknowledging that the sources of his selections were founded in the toil of regional art centres, open exhibitions and commercial galleries nationwide. Over the years, the catalogues produced in conjunction with Eurojet Futures have proven to be insightful documents. The texts by Ruth Carroll and Murphy usefully give an account of the concerns of these artists at a particular time in the development of their practice, along with substantial images of each artist's work.
According to an earlier plan, the fifth and final show in the series was to continue in the vein of the earlier ones and present another handful of artists. That strategy was abandoned in favour of a 'review' show, where all the twenty-seven artists from the previous four exhibitions were represented - some with new work and some not. This led to a patchy presentation on the whole, where much of the work on display merely scratched the surface of the artist's capability. A factor in the success of the previous exhibitions was the breathing space allowed to the artists, coupled with the play between the works which usually encouraged a lengthy engagement and ultimately, from this art lover's point of view, a more rewarding sense of the artists. That aside, Eurojet Futures - An Anthology... - with its range of media and subjects - gave a glimpse into a description of contemporary art in Ireland that is refreshing and happily diverse. Undoubtedly, it helped to have seen the earlier exhibitions and it helped also to have seen most of these artists' work exhibited in other venues previously.
The most striking element in this year's anthology was Nevan Lahart's Whiter than white sliced gama steak slave sandwich, 2005; not alone for its changing form and content over the duration of the exhibition due to the fascinating intervention of Johnston Mooney and O'Brien in the work, but for its stand-alone quality, both literally and conceptually. Though this attribute was somewhat unfortunate for the work nearby, with its ability to eclipse quieter, more understated presentations, the brazenness of its scale and apparent lack of interest in high finish instantly echo the wonderful energy of Thomas Hirschhorn. The social drive of the work continues that echo in a remarkable and engrossing Monument to the sub-minimum wage, derived in substance from the connotations of the simplest of metaphors, bread.
In a semi-enclosed corner, the juxtaposition of work by Jeanette Doyle, Amy O'Riordan, Gemma Browne and Amanda Coogan created a linkage between these women that could have limited the reading of their work to a bright, glossy femininity. Visually, the pieces were cohesive and provided a mini-exhibition within the larger one, but individually, the work of these four artists, as usual, merited closer, slower consideration to allow the disparities between them to emerge. O'Riordan's photographic prints continue to astound all sensibility with garish portraits of herself and her milieu in titillated impressions of femaleness. In contrast, Doyle's work seems wilfully opposed to any such clarity: her low-key paintings with printed narratives depict the artist on a celebrity-spotting trail around New York that may or may not have happened.
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Katy Simpson, echo, 2004, oil on two separate panels, 50.8 x 86.4 cm; courtesy Royal Hibernain Academy
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Linda Quinlan's intriguingly titled floor sculpture I want you around, 2005, seems designed to leave the viewer curious to know more, as does Paul Nugent's intimate 1994 photographic contacts of, among other things, a person in a nun's habit. With both of these productively idiosyncratic artists, as with many others in this exhibition, knowing more of their work was essential to making sense of their presentations in Eurojet Futures - An Anthology... The works of Brendan Early, Kristina Huxley, Oliver Comerford, Ciarán Murphy, Katy Simpson and Julie Merriman, for example, are all wall-works which together demonstrated that the traditional art of drawing and painting is alive and well in contemporary Ireland. However, the sense that each of these artists, given further space, could do so much more than just evoke their practice was the overriding conclusion from this display of their work.
On the end wall, the projects of Mark Clare and Vanessa O'Reilly sat well together, with vaguely related senses of the potential of art in its connection to social activism of one kind or another. However, these documentary works too seem a little lost in the spatial limitations of the overall exhibition. The audio immersion contingent to the pieces by Audiovisualdisco, John Gerard and Gail O'Reilly, combated this problem in part, but the works, while captivating in themselves, remain somehow lonely in this context.
The relative strength of Lahart's piece and the 'corner show of women' in the context of Eurojet Futures - An Anthology... had much to do with the approach the artists appear to have taken. Lahart presumably saw this as a chance to produce a new work and did so, irrespective of the group situation. By comparison, it felt as if many of the other works in the exhibition were selected because they were portable pieces, which left the viewer wanting more. The space restriction may have been a factor in this, but it seems a pity then that this perhaps unnecessary and at times compromised re-statement of these artist's abilities and interests was at the expense of a solid exhibition opportunity for another six or seven artists. Curatorial innovation it was not: shrewd endorsement it may well prove to be. The objective of developing a series of one-person shows from this portfolio of artists will hopefully provide encouragement, not just for the individual artists, but also for the wider vibrant and confident Irish art scene that Eurojet Futures has tapped into over the last five years.
Niamh Ann Kelly is an art writer, critic and lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology.
Eurojet Futures - An Anthology of Emerging Art From Ireland, Royal Hibernian Academy, Gallagher Gallery, July - August 2005
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