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Autumn 2001 - review: Cork C97 The revamped Intermedia festival, which is hosted by the Triskel Arts Centre, took place from May 17 to 31. Live performance is a strong element to the festival and this year it kicked off in convincing style with sets from Finnish electronic duo Pan Sonic who also presented a sound installation. As did Philip Jeck, whose installation consisted of six old gramophone style record players. Some of the records were gouged in a way that caused them to continually loop at a certain point. There is nothing new in this. At the time I went to it there were three records playing: two conversational German discs, one of which was skipping, the third Disney's Fantasia . After a while one became lost in the ambience of the soundscape as bright colours swirled on a screen. However, one could play anything over Fantasia and it would sound good. The primary impulse was to manipulate the volume and speed of the machines, thus orchestrating the soundscape itself, but this was forbidden. The public were also directed not to touch Pan Sonic's piece which consisted of a line of transistor radios all tuned to the same frequency; however, on the opening night people were changing the frequency to 2FM and the likes. One of the more interesting attempts in engaging the public in an unexpected way was Alan Phelan's video installation in the waiting room of the Anglesea Street Garda station. Part of a project that was commissioned by South Dublin County Council, it featured a group of individuals talking to camera about events happening in their area and in their lives. So straight-faced are these people in both their deception and self-deception that they initially inspire sympathy despite their complicity. There were obvious ones but the more ambiguous ones were pointed and slyly subversive given that their musings were being vented in a Garda station.
Gallery Two of the Triskel hosted Frieda Meaney's Blue roses, crows and bog pools . Inspired by her visits to the Beara bog, her 'bog maps' serve as meditations on the angular shifts in the bog landscape and the subtle variations in texture and shade. Reflecting the layered evolutionary process of the topography Meaney paints in layers and lets it evolve in an organic way. Upstairs in Gallery One, Deirdre A. Power's Barely Visible introduces us to the private worlds of the old characters she used to serve when she worked in a bar in New York for 14 years. Her photographs are primarily concerned with the spaces these people inhabit when they're not out drinking. In society's eyes, whether they are at home or out 'cocktailing', they are barely visible yet this exhibition shows us people who've lived life and have no regrets such as the vibrant John Jack De Buitleir exuding pride and vanity in They all want to play like a black man, but not look like one, baby doll... There is also immeasurable sadness here as one character, lost in his own private suffering, resigns himself with the line I do not mind you take my picture, like now...
Tiger Tiger Burning Bright at the Fenton Gallery attempted to tackle the big issue of the Celtic economy. Taking its cue from Blake's poem The Tyger it may have been more appropriate to borrow its theme from Clarke's The lost Heifer . Not just because of the presence of Dermot Seymour's cow paintings but through the metaphor of lost ideals, which finds quaint expression in Basil Blackshaw's The First Tractor in Randalstown . Painted specifically for this exhibition there's a playfulness about it which makes it seem like an ironic response to Seán Keating's trumpeting of technology-driven progress in Tipwagon Poulaphouca . Still there was no denying the fearful symmetry of Frank Corry's pinstripe-fabric-covered BMW, a sinister view of a self-regarding élite who care little for the less nimble who get in its path.
The Fenton then followed that with the more whimsical Above which takes clouds as its theme. However, other concerns are apparent behind the surface. Nick Miller's Cloud Above series is obsessional in its approach. Miller draws the sky from the back of his canvas-covered truck, locked in a battle with the nebulous matter above as he layers each moment of change over the previous one. One imagines that his hands are much of a blur as the changing clouds merge within the spatial confines of the canvas, but there is never a definitive moment. For Grace Weir time is both linear and cyclical. Her video pieces Forgetting (the vanishing point) shows the changes a cloud undergoes over its nine-minutes duration. The asking price of £4,000 shouldn't be necessary to convince one that they would be better employed watching the real thing. Much more satisfying is he Clearing . The camera traces a continuous dizzying arc through the clouds and murky sea. It is her Glare Series of film negatives of video stills in sealed plastic which best captures the moment and renders it alien, like some distant cosmic nebulae. The notion that throwaway things are important is explored in Jane McAdam Freud's Resonating in UCC's Boole Library. 'Resonating' refers to the process of one object recalling and informing another. McAdam Freud achieves this by juxtaposing broken relics from ancient Rome and Egypt with the ubiquitous Coke can. She treats and sculpts these everyday objects in a way that validates their motto of being 'unique' and 'original'. Her rigorous archaeology rescues them from anonymity. Over in UCC's Electrical Engineering building was the 1999 Cork Arts Society student of the year, Lorraine Mullins. Departures is her second solo exhibition and it shows a development in her style. The bold and imposing canvases remain but they contain less abstract forms; in fact you can make out horizons in some of them. Her paintings, predominantly fiery reds and yellows, have become darker and have a messy physicality about them. It is a tribute to the photography students of St. John's Community College that they were invited to exhibit in the O'Rahilly Building in UCC under the banner Photo! Photo! Featuring fifteen graduates of the two-year photography course, the work was diverse in its themes and there was a strong individual element to the way the works were presented.
Two installations which I greatly enjoyed were Clare Twomey's Watching Change and Malachi Farrell's Fish Flag Mourant (Black Kettle) . London-based Twomey's installation was part of her month-long artist-in-residency at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh. Delightful in its simplicity, the installation consisted of a foot-long border of cut paper which covered the three walls of the exhibition room (the fourth wall is made up of glass windows and doors which open onto a balcony overlooking the sea). Fully integrating into the space it acted as a receptor for the weather, responding to and reflecting the outside atmosphere, which lent it its own nature Ethereal and calming it was as if the installation and the space were made for each other. As part of the Cork Midsummer Festival, the Crawford Art Gallery hosted Farrell's kinetic meditation on the environment. In a room lined with trash an elaborate mobile with mechanised fish hangs over an embryonic fish in some kind of incubator. Tubes emerge spewing suds. Macabre. When activated the piece builds up to a symphony of agonising shrieks as the fish flap in pathetic fashion, suffocating in the squalour. If pollution were this exhilarating we'd all be doing it. Intermedia , May 2001
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