“The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope”(1) – Leonora Carrington What a fantastical world we expose when we penetrate the depth of our unconscious and concurrently the zenith of our imagination. Can any of us say for certain which is felt to be more consistent with that of ‘the real’: the structures of the conscious mind, or “…the unconscious and its – for the most… Read More »
McCarty and Kensmil at the RHA
Hard-Keepers by Marlene McCarty & Crying Light by Natasja Kensmil Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin 5 September – 20 October 2013 Review by Darren Caffrey Does anything frighten us like the merest sight of our own reflection? Terror comes of a story told to scare, equally the frame of art is no hiding place from the horrors of life. It could be, but artists don’t want it that way. Indeed fear is often as compelling as the lure of success. And so it is with two… Read More »
Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland & Eigse
Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland Isabel Nolan, Stephen McKenna, Poly Morgan, Dan Hays, Alex Rose, Djordje Ozbolt, Ben Long, Francis Upritchard, Yuriy Norshteyn, Martin Healyand Garrett Phelan. Curated by Stephen Brandes & Eigse Carlow Arts Festival 2013 Visual Art Open Submission 66 individual works selected by Stephen McKenna PPRHA & Emilia Stein RHA VISUAL, Carlow 7 June – 8 September 2013 Review by Darren Caffrey In the local sense, festivals and their associate art trails follow the scent of remuneration. Art spaces are key… Read More »
As uneasy as 1,2,3: A review of three per4mances
As uneasy as 1, 2, 3: A review of three per4mances Project Arts Centre and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 11 – 12 April 2013 By Darren Caffrey 1. May I Draw Your Eyes by Fergus Byrne as part of Between You Me and The Four Walls May I Draw Your Eyes, the first work of this series hosted by The Project Arts Centre, saw Byrne seated in a wooden construct similar to that from which the devil plays his best… Read More »
REVIEW: TULCA 2012
The 2012 Tulca: Season of Visual Art was the tenth anniversary of Galway’s 2 week, multi-location event. Always in mid November, it utilises existing arts infrastructure and activates a variety of disused ‘slack spaces’ or rather vacant buildings and shops. This year was no different as the exhibitions bring “together 41 artists over 10 locations.” I had lived in the west of Ireland for about 6 years and know the festival somewhat intimately. I exhibited in 2006, the year Cliodhna Shaffrey and Sarah… Read More »
The future
Futures 2012 is joyously mixed in its form and yet it is this distraction which when presented to us is hoped will overcome the obvious weaknesses of art without proper framing or even depth. On one wall sits the result of a routine investigation into the world outside of a window, Ed Miliano “began making a visual diary, painting one picture every day”, and to that end, judging by the quantity, he has succeeded. It is identified that the pictures when viewed together ‘create a collective… Read More »
At the Still Point
At the Still Point: Irish Women Artists working in FilmAideen Barry, Cecily Brennan, Anita Groener, Tracy Hanna, Jesse Jones, Niamh O’Malley, Aine Phillips & Vivienne Dick, Deborah SmithCurated by Josephine KelliherKilkenny Arts Festival9 – 18 August 2012Review by Darren Caffrey And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you: I will show you fear in a handful of dust i The Predicament of Man (2010), Jesse Jones, 3minutes Upon… Read More »
Another View of Helene
Another View of Helene Fiona Larkin 28th of April – 10th of June Butler Gallery, Kilkenny Review by Darren Caffrey Gallery visitor in the corridor outside (Reviewers Own)There is no obvious danger but the question of who protects us looms large. Connection made through the use of artistic controls, Larkin offers herself to a force, perhaps even her very own deity. Yellows can be spotted everywhere, as miscellaneous shapes hidden within a book, as a mistaken mark set within a frame, in the photographs of… Read More »
Her art on my sleeve
What appeared to be a slew of papier mache chicken legs beckoned cheekily from the display window at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. They were advertising The Human Race, Sonia Shiel’s first solo exhibition at the venue. It was hard to tell if the sight was something farcical or bizarrely fanciful. Regardless, it certainly begged for further investigation. As Shiel’s known for an aesthetic that can at times seem unfathomably loose and slapdash – think surrealist artist/director Michel Gondry’s cardboard news studio in Science of Sleep –… Read More »
REVIEW: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali
Wow-ta-fuck. Pictures were largely unobtainable and descriptions fall short; the works of Anselm Kiefer, on show at the newest of London’s Whitechapel ventures, appear as nothing less than awesome. In the end, it might come down to a simple fact of alchemy, a beauty that transports material into another dimension of realism, a feeling of creation. Oxidisation of copper and the impregnation of lead amounts to a captivation of the surface and the spirit, each work as a complete thing. Yes, there is a uniformity,… Read More »
#DubCon11 Best Review Award
Dublin Contemporary 2011 was a big ask. We are, in this country, often adrift of the curve, somewhere between a second thought and a small wish. In this respect, the whole conception from beginning to end was a true achievement in its ambition and also in its disregard for the rules of play. Let us not consider the politics surrounding the event as anything more than reality, no doubt one from which a lot will be learnt, and taken by those who must. What is… Read More »
REVIEW: 228 Lashes
“The important thing is no longer the storage but the display.” – Paul Virilio Padraig Robinson’s 228 Lashes is a sparsely populated show in Galway’s 126 gallery. The fully lit neutrality of the white rectangle space draws the viewer in to scrutinise the pieces that comprise an installation ruled by a minimalist inclination. The paucity of works highlights the artist’s three choices: An illuminated retail style sign with a cryptic logo, the lowering of a single gallery light fixture to around… Read More »
REVIEW: Art in the Streets
This far reaching 5 month exhibition at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA has been billed as “the first major U.S. museum exhibition on the history of graffiti and street art”. Interesting. It is a broad concept housed in a 40,000 square foot former police car warehouse renovated by famed California architect Frank Gehry. Installation view of Street Market. Courtesy Arrested Motion. The full list of artists range from former graffiti artists that have successfully crossed over to the commercial gallery scene (like Banksy and Barry… Read More »
Supreme Fiction
Supreme Fiction Ian Burns Butler Gallery, Kilkenny August 6th – October 9th 2011 Review by Darren Caffrey The artist Ian Burns’ work, currently showing in Kilkenny’s Butler Gallery is a compendium of product and perception. A plastic shower basin is presented to us as an upright form allowing the plug hole to become a kind of spy hole. It is this type of revelation through the use of commonly recognisable objects which typifies the selection of works on show. Each piece a tableau of some… Read More »
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2011
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2011 – Visual Arts Programme David Beattie, Ann Craven, Maria McKinney, Nick Miller, Michael Thomas Murphy, Liam O’Callaghan and Jacco Olivier Curated by Josephine Kelliher 5th – 14th August 2011 By Darren Caffrey Despite not having had the opportunity to view all of the works in this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival, there is still much to say and there is good reason to share. The short-term life span of festivals like this one creates two very explicit contexts into which art must… Read More »
REVIEW: Hammer and Feather – Experiments in Space
The title of the exhibition curated by Mary Conlon refers to an experiment conducted on the moon in 1971 to demonstrate Galileo’s counter intuitive assertion that without air resistance all objects fall at the same speed. But the words hammer and feather also suggests sets of oppositions beyond light and heavy, such as light and dark, natural and manufactured or organic and mineral, which might also be invalidated by physical laws, gravitational or otherwise. Variations around titles and artworks is a recurring theme of the… Read More »
A Knowledge of Things Familiar
A Knowledge of Things Familiar David Beattie Temple Bar Gallery 27 May – 30 June 2011 by Darren Caffrey Do we know our own desires? The question of the object in art, now, as surely any time ever before, stands up and reasons with us that desire is more powerful, that desire rules all. It might be said that this is why sensation commands such a vital role in what makes us human: that life is the experience which binds us. We want it all,… Read More »
DECOMMISSIONED
‘An art and music festival that will leave you questioning your next destination‘ The undisguised commercialism of the slogan heralding the website of Terminal Convention – an event compounding art fair, farmer market, music festival, art exhibition and symposium – announces an open if somewhat facetious approach to the relationship between artistic ambitions and mercantile activities, a perspective re-asserted in the opening paragraph of the symposium presentation‘art is now a commodity like any other’. This positioning toward the market is developed in essays published in… Read More »
You Had Another Skin
You Had Another Skin (The Super 8 Series) Cecilia Danell EIGHT February 22nd – April 2nd 2011 By Simon FlemingYou Had Another Skin (The Super 8 Series), Cecilia Danell’s solo exhibition at Bar Eight in Galway, is a small and intimate sampling from a diverse artist. It immediately brings to mind Lucy Lippard’s quote from her book The Lure of the Local: “If place is defined by memory, but no one who remembers is left to bring these memories to the surface, does a place… Read More »
Three Solo Exhibitions
Three Solo Exhibitions Ramon Kassam, Laura McMorrow and Mark O’Kelly OccupySpace22nd October- 6th November 2010By Deirdre Kelly The exhibition is housed in OccupySpace, an artist led initiative, part of the Creative Limerick scheme. It comprises three solo artists working in or associated with Limerick city, each with an individual body of work which comes together in a co-operative programme.Paint-things by Ramon Kasson are the first to feature upon initial entry into the large open exhibition space situated on Thomas Street. The area is stark and… Read More »