CIRCA 89

Like much of the work in this show, the title of Katie Holten's latest exhibition--Some Grand Plans--is ambiguous: 'grand' suggests both something intended to be elegant or extravagant (as in 'Grand Tour'), and also--in the Irish usage of the word (as in "they were grand sausages, thank you")--signifies something that is pleasing or acceptable. It's the kind of faintly mischievous double-edge that Holten's work enjoys.

Even the plans are both physical and ideal. Certainly there are drawings that are minute and precise constructions, but what they intend and what they mean are obviously two quite different things. They look scientific: there are diagrams, formulae, equations and lists. They could be architect's doodles, or a scientist's blackboard drawings to accompany a lecture; or even rather slapdash electrical specifications. At first glance, they seem recognisable, familiar as something, even if we're not sure quite what.

On closer inspection, they refute a more detailed reading: they simply don't make sense in any way that we'd expect. They confound a ready comprehension with a transformational humour that constantly upends our expectations and forces us to look again. In one drawing, an extension to a souterrain becomes a floor plan of a modern bungalow. Another series (elevated on high plinths so you don't even see the drawings at first) details a sprinkler system which doubles as a rejuvenation plan. Another connects Ardee (her hometown) with the very similar Berlin. Hers is an ironic, playful and subversive aesthetic which accommodates a diverse range of media (photographic, audio and textual pieces), along with a variety of subjects ranging from nonsense to complex, from fantasy to fun.

The title piece involves a length of cork sheeting, on which is pinned a medley of drawings, business cards, paper scraps, notes, photos, maps and lists of things like work outstanding, jobs to be done or food to buy. Inconsequential stuff, of course, nothing that we wouldn't throw away without a second thought. But when accumulated, the material gathers a deeper resonance: in such details are lives both planned minutely and, just as minutely, then frittered away. Holten is good at holding back, at knowing how to excite the viewers' interest, while not drowning us in either extrapolation or interpretation. There's an engaging lightness of touch here that accommodates some pretty 'grand' philosophical ideas without a trace of the kind of ponderous gravitas that would have laboured the piece. Ardee Bog shows Holten playing with another of her preoccupations: map-making. It look like an ENFO poster, with a series of photographic close-ups of (cod?) natural details like Rheindeer moss. But these are set against signs of human usage--a derelict car; a distant figure, a thrown-away plastic bag. Again, there's an attractive trickiness to it. Holten--director of the 'TÛP Institute for Contemporary Art'--has a way of toying with the way we look at space and our surroundings that makes for an inventive and enjoyable exhibition.

There's a similarly engaging humour to be found in Sensation (by deprivation), a mixed-media show by newcomers Adrian and Shane at the Droichead Arts Centre in July. Not that you'd know it from their "mission statement," which declares with a rather frightening seriousness that the exhibition is about: "exploring the reasons why we deny ourselves feelings, emotions and life," and offers "an insight using duality through a journey." Happily, the work itself largely subverts such inflated psycho-babble. While there is much text on show--hand-written onto photographic montages, mounted on slides in the audio-visual, and printed on cubes in the sculptural pieces--it is mostly epigrammatic. In the audio-visual, phrases such as "All is heaven sent" and "wears his cares" are flashed between two static slides reading "overboard". It's a flippant (if slightly obvious) statement of how language makes pronouncements which are loud and absolute, but often fragmentary, and therefore meaningless.

This is an exhibition which puts the artists centre-stage. Echoes of Gilbert and George are unmissable. There are several images of themselves, usually presented in a context which inverts their self-absorption. For example, the wonderful Adrian and Shane action dolls (looking for all the world like real children's toys, complete with appropriate packaging, costumes and tiny palettes), and the Official Shane and Adrian fashion paper dolls (packs of flat dolls with the kind of cut-out, tabbed costumes to be found in annuals and comics) show the artist as plaything to be constructed and made over by the contributing viewer. Or nearly: the viewer can't actually play with the dolls because the packaging ensures that they remain inviolable. Similarly, the naked, crouched and sleeping figures of the artists photographed in Bath (half-full) suggest a vulnerability which is belied by the sheer size of the prints, and by the presence of the extensive silver insulation which both protects the figure and maintains its separateness from us. In both cases, the image of the artist appears to be almost shockingly accessible, but ultimately it refuses interpretation.

This work pays its necessary dues to pop art. Adrian's Warholesque sequence A lot of shoes is bright and brash. Even pop groups get a look-in: the Spice Girls are there, overlaid with an image of a dollar bill. So is ABBA, set in a large sequence of 28 collage-type images which pit text, drawings, photographs, and paintings against each other. The effect is eclectic: at times, the visual joke (or linguistic pun) wears too thin to accommodate much humour, but others in the sequence are sharp and smart. If at times a little youthful and a little too reliant on the slick, it is still an exhibition that offers enjoyment and fun.

Stephen Walsh's oils, at TristAnn's in June, are fired with ideas. His religious beliefs inform his painting to a degree not often seen amongst contemporary artists. As a Rastafarian, he is preoccupied with issues of social justice, exile and ethnicity. Titles like Universal Rastafari and Inspiration of Jah say as much. Their colour and energy has a sensual appeal, but the works are not satisfied with that. They have a message to convey and they seem to want to say more than to be. In his press notes, Walsh writes: "When a painting is done, I've said what I wanted to say..." As a medium of communication, the paintings are obliged to keep one eye on the viewer and one on the source of the message, the artist himself. They suffer under this imperative: the obvious passion of their composition does not translate into work that has cast off its maker, to stand alone to be judged on its own merits, without reference to the impetus that caused it to be made. For all their urgency and passion, they do not become the message, they only articulate it. As such, they nudge too close to the dogmatic. Anger too often obliterates humour, and although there is certainly celebration here, it is overrun by a relentlessly loud and driven tone that either inflames the viewers' own enthusiasm, or just doesn't.

And finally, a major retrospective of the works of Camille Souter and Nano Reid, at the Droichead Arts Centre in June, highlighted the extent of the body of work which both artists have put together. Nano Reid, a native of Drogheda, has a deserved and well-established reputation as one of the vanguard figures of Irish modernism. The work on show here catalogues her engagement with the Irish landscape, and her development from representational painting to something much closer to abstraction. Her use of muted, almost wan colour tones--her reliance on green and grey in particular--is particularly striking. Though the colours are serious, even leaden and grave, the works themselves never are. Their treatment of subjects drawn from the natural world is richly evocative, and her later paintings of aeroplanes and flying are delightful.

Camille Souter's paintings have a statuesque elegance to them, even when the subject is something as banal as silage bags. She is an artist who avoids prettiness while seeking beauty. The still lifes on show here are strongly evocative, with Slaughtered Cow--Ten Minutes Dead in particular standing out. This retrospective serves Souter's work well: it displays her development as a painter, her presiding thematic concerns, and her great artistic sensitivity and capabilities. It is a real pleasure to have this work available, and on such a large scale, to audiences in this region.

Katie Holten: Some Grand Plans, The Basement Gallery, Dundalk, May 1999
Adrian and Shane: Sensation (by deprivation), Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda, July 1999 (Adrian and Shane's website)
Stephen Walsh: Black Woman and Child, TristAnn's Gallery, Dundalk, June 1999
Nano Reid and Camille Souter: Retrospective Exhibition, Droichead Arts Centre, May 1999; Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, June 1999

Vona Groarke's most recent collection of poems is Other People's House, published in April by the Gallery Press.

Review reproduced from CIRCA 89, Autumn 1999, pp. 50-51

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