Spring 2001 - Limerick review
Circa 95 review: Limerick  | | Javier de la Garza: Vanitas - Vanitatae ; courtesy Limerick City Gallery of Art | Limerick's closing exhibitions of 2000 gave audiences good opportunities to witness how contemporary practice (art and design) celebrates itself. Sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, video, media mixed and unmixed, were set out as process and/or product in nine venues, 24 shows (nine solo, 15 group) offering works by more than 250 artists. These numbers are unexceptional for Limerick. But the work recycled two standard critical concerns in exceptionally dramatic ways: the problem of art versus craft and the media-rivalry issue: photo-video versus non- (or even anti-) photo-video. These interrelated concerns lie unresolved at the heart of the struggle art wages within the culture it serves. Problems of if, when and how craft/technique becomes art, which is basic in the making of all work, rose especially prominent in three shows: the RDS WINNERS 2000 (The Contemporary Irish Craft and Design Competition, touring at the Hunt Museum); Irish Contemporary Ceramics 2000 (touring at Limerick City Gallery of Art - LCGA); and El Día de los Muertos ('the day of the dead') altar of Mexican popular/folk art (also at LCGA). Imbuing material, design, and theme with strong imaginative expression, so readily apparent in the simple, crude, anonymous Mexican work (mostly ceramic) was also the impetus felt in the technically superior ICC work. Established artists such as (to name a few out of 30) Cormac Boydell, Jill Crowley, Peter Meaney, Ann-Marie Robinson and Sarah Ryan (her death in November a great loss to us all) are close to being 'Mexican' as their humour and inventive expressiveness out-paces technique. RDS WINNERS was just that; their triumphant display of skill and technique spread through a stunning array of materials, media and design priorities. There were few 'Mexicans' here, yet the urge to push skills to and even beyond limits can, and here sometimes did, bestow that magic aura of excellence that transforms an object into art; notable out of 65 exhibitors were Ann Fleeton (patchwork), Gareth Colgan (calligraphy), Geoffrey Healy (jugs). Four printmaker exhibitions showed work by students, teachers and nationally and internationally established artists. The Annual Limerick Print Auction at Limerick City Hall once again claimed success in providing a receptive buyer audience with wide stylistic and thematic choices of work in all print disciplines and, as well, an enjoyable evening's entertainment. The Limerick Printmakers, a thriving studio/gallery venture established in 1999, having previously held a sell-out painting exhibition by Martin Finnan, offered Eleven X Two , an exhibition with small-scale, delicate, 'portrait' etchings and dry points of birds by Kari Fry and chairs by Sarah McCord. The well established Chris Doswell Print Gallery offered Never Enough - a solo show of four relief and 15 silkscreen prints by Des McMahon - and the Limerick Small Print Exhibition 2000 , an open-submission/selected show of 48 works by 29 artists from six countries. McMahon has a well developed style of bold shapes and tones committed to themes with a tough, sardonic sense of irony and heavy, dark humour. LSPE offered a mix of figurative, landscape, and abstract work all successful at meeting the demands of print disciplines. Prizes went to Leonie King's abstractions, rich in colour contrast, and David Lilburn's loose linear sketches of mystic landscapes. Three of the 15 group exhibitions incorporated works thoroughly mixed in media. Profiles , the 2000 additions to the National Self-portrait Collection at the Bourne Vincent Gallery , University of Limerick (UL), added 16 new works to the total now of 318. Since its inception in 1979 the Collection has increased in the quality of work as much as in quantity; and the range of media is wide. For 2000 it goes from bronze - Janet Mullarney - and ceramic - Cormac Boydell - to photography - Martin Parr and Fergus Martin - lithography - Sara Horgan - painting - Neil Shawcross - and drawing - Hughie O'Donoghue. What the collection cries out for now is a properly set up exhibition space of its own. Iontas , the eleventh of Sligo's annual small-works exhibition (touring to LCGA) offered 162 works by 99 artists in widely varied media. A busy, noisy, crowded but carefree show, Iontas continues to hold great interest for a wide audience. It also showed the growth of photography, which was the sole or major medium in as many as 30 of the works, compared to painting (36), drawing (29),and sculpture (10). Some of the awards were given to works with strong photo influence; painting: Paul Wilson, The Chemist; print: Andrew Folan, Temolo; travel: Sally Maidment, Old Baggage. This alignment of photo media alongside the other non-photo media showed clearly in the annual Quadrant 2000 at the Belltable . Two painters, Leah Murphy and Ciarán O'Sullivan, offered expressive abstractions, the latter in large format; Debbie Godsell showed etchings devoted to a project entitled Savage in which photo-derived figures are fitted out as specimens of the uncivilized; and Franck Allais showed large-format, black/white photographs of non-narrative views of enlarged domestic details 1 . The work of O'Sullivan and Allais, in wall to wall confrontation, dramatized the rivalry of paint versus photography. The latter seemed confidently indifferent to the drip and run of paint in the former which in turn showed more than a hint of photography in loose montages of contrasting shapes and patterns that provided the necessary, controlled support for the push/pull of surface gestures. | | | Javier de la Garza: Vanitas - Vanitatae ; courtesy Limerick City Gallery of Art | In a further seven exhibitions at LCGA, one at UL and another at RAP's (Real Art Project) new premises these issues continued to unfold and engross. For paint: Sarah Durcan, New Work Paintings/Works on paper ; Jeanette Doyle, Full of It ; Richard Gorman, Made in Japan ; and Paddy Lennon, Recent Works at UL. For photography: Javier de la Garza, Vanitas - Vanitatae ; for video: Dennis Connolly/Anne Cleary, Des Vraies Histoires ; Susan MacWilliam, The Persistence of Vision , and (at RAP) a large international group show by 20 artists; lastly, a performance/installation with documentary photography, Michael Timpson's Leaving Cheyenne , was held at LCGA.  | | Michael Timpson: Leaving Cheyenne ,2000, installation at Limerick City Gallery of Art; photo Chuck Mayers; courtesy Limerick City Gallery of Art | Gorman showed large and small, hand-made, washi paper works that grew out of his recent studies in Japan, which have helped him to further clarify the dramatic changes in shape, colour and composition his abstract work has undergone in recent years. Durcan's 17 works assembled and free-floated in painted space distinctive shapes, close-toned colours, and montage compositions of great gentleness and intelligence. Elements borrowed from photo and textual sources further underscored the work's poetic ambiguities. Doyle showed four varied sets of work based on computer use: credit card as portrait; the five senses digitally desensitized; interiors of consumption and hygiene, and three media combines (photo/paint/digital prints) that ended up as framed still-life reproductions. Here Tesco consumer products merged with domestic-product painting of 17th-century Holland. The work was so honed you hardly felt the entering blade. Lennon (at UL) showed moody landscapes that he successfully aimed toward the arousal of feelings of rest, peace and awe, devoid of trouble; feelings that were more illustrated than expressed. De la Garza offered 16 unframed, middle- to large-scale, close-up photographs of Barbie's mate, Ken. Given genitals and allowed to fatten and betray signs of age and dissolution, he became a blunt tool in this Mexican artist's satiric attack on the deception and distortion imposed on other cultures by culture in the U.S.A. MacWilliam's video, new work made at P.S.1 , New York, continues her series devoted to women who have had marked spiritual experiences that often accompany distress and tragedy. Here a woman, blind and bed-ridden for 50 years through accident, develops multiple personalities and clairvoyant powers. This well-edited colour video projection unfolds her visionary experiences in a flood of sequenced patterns. Connolly/Cleary's new digital projection consisted of four films mixing the real and fictional; 11 previous films made since 1997 were presented on monitor. Based in Paris, their organization, the Institute of Anarchic Titillation (IAT), aims fun, irony and ridicule at art-world and non-art situations. Their confident commitment to narrative was shared by all 18 artists in Vague but True, an international video programme on tour at RAP. This comprised a great variety of story lines projected in three rooms totaling two hours duration. With the exception of Gerard Byrne's Why it's Time for Imperial , few seemed willing to meet the technical demands that MacWilliam and IAT gracefully met. The last to mention may well prove to be the first in importance; Timpson, from Athy, based in New York since 1973, offered in his first major show in Ireland a complex combination of materials, media and design disciplined into a comprehensive structure and driven by enormous intuitive energy. Work like this has already commanded a major following on the Continent and in America 2 . His performances and installations are full-blown baroque in the true, best sense of that term. The accompanying illustrations do give a fair idea of the work. He has as peers, for heroics Sean Scully, for humanities, James Coleman. Of him much more needs to be heard. 1 See Cork review in this issue , p. 51 - Ed.
2 See review of opening of SMAK, CIRCA 89, pp. 58-59 - Ed. Paul O'Reilly Article reproduced from CIRCA 95,Spring 2001, pp. 58-61.
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