Circa 118: Review

Niamh O’Malley : Lough Owel. ‘vignette’ , 2006, DVD projection 5 min 28 sec loop, oil on canvas 163 x 122 cm; courtesy Green on Red Gallery

The combination of two representable objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented . Sergei Eisentein

On entering the central space of the gallery, we are presented with three screens on adjacent walls each with its own projector. There is no curtain to the usual dark enclosed viewing area leaving one free to walk between screens in a random fashion. Each screen shows a different scene using looped videos of varying length. In Talbot Street ‘vignette’ , the only urban scene, we see people coming towards us or passing away from us down the street. Initially this appears to be a view observed every day in the city as a train passes on the bridge above and flags and a tree gently wave in the breeze. But very quickly the scene becomes spatially and visually disorientating. The figures take on a ghost-like immateriality as they walk through the tree or a black bollard in the foreground of the screen. As the 3 minute 46 second loop ends, the tree and the bollard are revealed to be oil-painted representations beneath the looped video imagery. In the other two rural landscape scenes, Lough Owel ‘vignette’ and Croagh Patrick ‘vignette ,’ a similar experience occurs as the ghostly figures pass through a solid diving platform beside a lake or through the rocks of Croagh Patrick. In spite of knowing and anticipating O’Malley’s unique superimposition of two different modes of representation, for this viewer at least, they still exert a strong impact. This is because the work manages to do a number of things simultaneously. By complicating viewing conventions associated with the painted and filmic image, O’Malley neatly subverts them and makes it apparent that the assumptions surrounding them are inherited, cultural, historical constructions. By exploiting pictorial, cinematic and temporal space, notions of the ‘real’ become challenged to highlight the age-old tension between seeing and knowing in a novel way. Perhaps O’Malley’s strategy could be described as a new form of montage? Eisenstein, explaining how montage worked, used the analogy of Egyptian hieroglyphs: “… each taken separately corresponds to an object but their combination corresponds to a concept.” If we accept this analogy, in which abstract meanings can be created by the juxtaposition of two different kinds of objects/ media, what concepts are explored in O’Malley’s art?

A number of points become clear on close observation of the three works in the exhibition. The circular, repetitive visual structure employed in each vignette creates an echo with the mechanical means used to produce the moving imagery. In addition, the experience of looking becomes intensified by the complete elimination of sound. Thus the gap between two different modes of representation is maintained: the silence of painting and the typically narrative mode of cinema. The effort to assert a pictorial rather than a cinematic response to the moving imagery is further reinforced by the use of ordinary video projection which effectively eliminates the lush glossiness associated with the cinema screen. The utilisation of a pictorial rather than a cinematic scale for the moving imagery reinforces this anticinematic, anti-narrative mode of reception directing attention to the hand, touch, and physicality of paint as opposed to the ‘neutrality’ of technological production. The painterly treatment of the static acidic-coloured sky in Talbot Street ‘vignette’ is an example of this. The white static ‘spotlight’ in Lough Owel ‘vignette’ on the other hand, may refer to the ‘long take’ and ‘deep focus photography’ of earlier cinema, most notably in Citizen Kane (1941).The ‘long take’ implies a lack of fragmentation, the dramatic unity of space and time. However, this is paradoxically overturned by the constant looping of the videofilm where figures appear and disappear from the centrallyframed spotlight. In these reflexive documentary films, the spectator remains a voyeur distant from the filmed events, in part due to the documentary form but also to the static position of the camera over a long period of time (5 minutes 28 seconds). O’Malley constantly repositions the viewer by disrupting the processes of viewing from the comfort of habit, as the gaze oscillates between gestalts and the rabbit/ vase paradox created.

O’Malley’s work operates within the gap between formalism and realism, between the notion of realistic ‘truth’ associated with the documentary form and the illusionistic realism of the traditional hand-painted image. But in addition, by framing and reframing people and events, O’Malley’s hybrid films make a montage that suggests abstract notions of time, transience, and human mortality. Her work takes its place alongside artists of an older generation, like Patrick Ireland and James Coleman, who also probe the complexities of perception and reception, although with different means and in different ways. O’Malley’s continuing exploration will be worth following in the coming years.

Dr. Brenda Moore-McCann is a writer, critic and art historian based in Dublin; she is a member of AICA Ireland.

Dublin - Niamh O'Malley - Green on Red Gallery -

Reprinted from Circa 118, Season 2006, pp. 86- 87

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