Margaret Corcoran's exhibition of 12 paintings entitled La Primerva elaborates a research path which enthusiastically negotiates fragmentation, the incidental and chance encounters. What becomes central to Corcoran is the seemingly irrelevant details of 'old masters.' In this encounter Corcoran not only enters into a conversation with these works but creates a conversation between disparate works which seemingly, on first appearances, have little in common. The in-between space this opens up is intriguing for the viewer, posing questions on the history and the erotics of looking while implicating Corcoran's own subjective look (as female artist) in this representational process. Rather than an imposed look outwards, here the subjectivity of the female artist works as a central component of this mediation, offering many poetic and nuanced paintings.

Corcoran uses Botticelli's Primavera as a starting point. This depiction of the mythological character Chloris/Flora and her speech of 'vernal roses' becomes entwined in Corcoran's visual play of detail which she overlays on different portraits. In Corcoran's La Primavera , which interprets an Ingres portrait of the Duc d'OrlŽans, she overlays what appears like patterned ribbons flowing down his face. Rather than tearful they appear as imagined threads leading his gaze out of the painting and across to some imagined feminine space. Interpreted through this trajectory, the ribbons connect what is not made visible, suggesting a haptic response to the play of looks presented in this exhibition. The ribbons act as an exit from Corcoran's pictorial space. In nearly all the paintings she allows points of entrance and exit from these pictorial spaces which are suggestive of counterparts or imagined propositions of the fictional beyond her paintings.

Corcoran in 'copying' the painting seems to accentuate what was always available for interpretation. Her work enters into a dialogue with Ingres's concerns, posing questions to particularities which may never have been discussed in any textual critique of the work but which become exposed in her reinterpretations.

The content of Mark O'Kelly's paintings in his exhibition Looking at Pictures are composed of images taken randomly from an archive of newspapers stored in his studio. The editing of these newspaper images to construct each painting shares a structural relationship to his previous work exhibited in 1998, Abstract Paintings. The paintings are all executed to expose their compositional trajectory, offering themselves as 'instructional diagrams' which chart O'Kelly's process of working. As an example of this diagrammatic quality, in nearly all the paintings O'Kelly employs the unpainted surface of the ground as a means of entering or exiting the work. Another is the colour range he uses which is restricted to that of digital printing used in newspapers.

Specifically in dialogue with Dutch landscape painting this work, while engaging on numerous levels with the history of painting, also negotiates photography, film and digital technology. This is most immediately apparent in the film-still quality of the paintings, many appearing like 'location' stills, tapping into the viewer's cinematic memory. Here very often a similarity to a particular film is noted while remaining unspecific.

The distance separating painting from technological reproduction, while obviously acknowledged by O'Kelly, also allows him a critically discursive space to negotiate current debates on what the film theorist Paul Willemen refers to as "regimes of subjectivity and looking." O'Kelly emphatically charts point of view in these paintings - concentrating in many instances on difficult point of view shots, from the omniscient helicopter or CCTV shot to the more debilitating view upwards of a table and chair. O'Kelly points to a paranoid mode of looking which seems to evacuate the subject. It is within this context of paranoid looking and the current discussions on the loss of the indexical through digital technology that O'Kelly creates an interesting dialogue: between the impossibility of painting to remove the indexical link to a body in space and time and the wider shifts in representation occurring in society. O'Kelly has already gained considerable recognition as an extremely proficient painter; however, this exhibition articulates clearly the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of his work.

Both Margaret Corcoran and Mark O'Kelly participated in 147's first exhibition/event, Visual Art is Disposable, which was held in the Social Hall, Liberty Hall. Here, research was also central. The question posed by the title was concerned not only with the work exhibited and the research this involved but also the concept of researching new ways of bringing artworks together. Thirty-eight artists exhibited their work. The emphasis, while being about the way different artists responded to the idea of disposable art, was also about researching the art-audience experience of the exhibition. The three-hour event, which included a DJ, Dennis McNulty, was incredibly well attended. Unlike the usual opening where very often people only manage a cursory glance at the art, here all work was engaged with, the audience aware that they could not return to the space to view it again. As one of the organizer's of this event, the obvious success of the exhibition was not only the very positive response of the audience but also realizing the extent to which artists desire a more diverse range of exhibition models. Both Margaret Corcoran and Mark O'Kelly exhibited work which was very different from their gallery work. This was evident in work by many of the artists, where the ephemeral aspect of the exhibition seemed to liberate many artists from the expectations of perceived audiences. Visual Art is Disposable suggested that more fluid and nomadic structures offer artists the potential means of reclaiming and expanding art and exhibition practices away from the institutionally defined norms administered so rigorously in the contemporary Dublin art scene.

Margaret Corcoran: La Primavera , Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, March 2001
Mark O'Kelly: Looking at Pictures , Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, April 2001
Visual Art is Disposable , 147 at Social Hall, Liberty Hall, 6-9pm 29th March. (For documentation of this exhibition and information of future events visit the web site which is temporarily at www.recirca.com/147 .