Visual Arts/ Aidan Dunne: ReviewedObscured by Architecture, County Hall Tallaght and Rathfarnham Castle untilAug 4; Lily-White, Gemma Browne, Kevin Kavanagh until Aug 11 (01-8740064)
As part of Obscured by Architecture in Tallaght, Ben Geoghegan's series of photographs, Galway Art Collection of Painting (verso), is arranged along one wall of the building's public concourse. A row of pictures, you might think at first glance, and of course you'd be right. But they are also the opposite of pictures. Geoghegan has ingeniously taken paintings from the Galway City Collection and photographed their backs.
The theme of the show is the question of public ownership of public space. It is part of Fused 06, South Dublin County's Arts Festival. Tallaght is undergoing a phenomenal rate of development. Around The Square, the skyline is a forest of cranes, and there is something disorientating and impersonal about the nature and scale of the development. The several component parts of Obscured by Architecture function in this context. All are sited in public spaces, and all address issues relating to ownership and use. Public property, Dempsey argues, "is something notionally owned by everyone and effectively owned by nobody".
Geoghegan's photographs offer an insight into the history of civic, public property. Paintings, once out of the artist's studio, accumulate evidence of their progress, chronicles of ownership, in terms of labels, stamps and various other marks and documentation affixed to their backs. This documentation can include letters relating to provenance, and press cuttings. What is perhaps surprising is that the backs of paintings make such interesting images. Geoghegan has printed each life-size, to match the real thing. He imparts a real sense of a painting as an object out there in the world, rather than being "a picture" in some abstract way.
Several other pieces are sited in the County Hall, including Aisling O'Beirn's Some Dublin Nicknames, a video scroll to which visitors are invited to add. Her tally so far leads one to conclude that the Millennium Spire in O'Connell St has attracted a record number of nicknames, most highly irreverent. Chris Reid's piece, a photo-text recounting the recollections of how Tallaght used to be on the part of a traveller, is also there, though its main incarnation was as a spread in in the Tallaght Echo. It exemplifies the way unbounded, anomalous spaces are progressively appropriated and demarcated.
Niamh McCann had the brilliant idea of salvaging the neon signage from the old Classic Cinema in Terenure and latterly Harold's Cross. At one stage everyone had a local cinema, and there was a sense of community about it. Now they have been squeezed out of the market by multiplexes. What has McCann chosen to do with the signage? Well, her installation is two-part, one in the County Hall, the other in Rathfarnham Castle.
She has used reflection in both, siting mirrors opposite the "CLASSIC CIN" part of the sign in County Hall and beneath the "EMA" part in Rathfarnham Castle. But why did she not make more of the anagrammatic possibilities? Hard to know. The Rathfarnham segment is particularly beautiful, sited in a large bay window, the mirrors reflecting the elaborate plasterwork of the ceiling, yet it is difficult not to feel that there was an opportunity lost along the way.
Not with Amanda Dunsmore, who made the most of having access to David Irvine and Martin McGuinness for her The Keeper Series. Both were filmed, individually, looking at a previous film of hers. What we see are static shots of both men, looking intently ahead or, effectively, occasionally smiling ruefully or broadly, mostly serious. Their images are sited face to face, on monitors, so that it is as if they are trying to stare each other down. Between is the public space, between political opponents. It's an impressive piece of work. It's true that, in Ireland, we have a poor record of taking ownership of that public space, and perhaps that is what has to change.
It may seem odd to say that Gemma Browne's exhibition, Lily-White at Kevin Kavanagh, is mostly about loss and regret. Each of the paintings that make up the show is a head-and-shoulders portrait of a smiling adolescent girl, each is carefully made up, well dressed. The overall feeling is of brightness, lightness, optimism. It is all summery, as Ruth Carroll points out in her catalogue essay. And yet, and yet . . . There is something wan and fugitive about the images. For one thing, Browne uses thin washes of acrylic colour, and they are greedily consumed by the relatively coarse weave of the canvas, so the images are barely articulated against the texture of the ground.
It seems as if the ostensibly cheerful portraits we are looking at are already fading. In keeping with Browne's previous work, collectively, the sameness of image suggests an ideal, a construct against which each girl measures herself and towards which she aspires. Yet it does not seem that Browne is attacking the many kinds of commodification to which adolescence is subject. Her paintings come across more as an evocation of a moment in which her subjects can glimpse overwhelmingly positive prospects for themselves, and what they might be. Prospects that are already effectively thwarted. Hence the premonitory sense of loss.
As Carroll points out, Browne is working in a much-explored area. Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik and Marlene Dumas all come to mind as relevant. Yet she does have a distinctive vision of her own. Her paintings make a case for themselves, though they are stronger in terms of their overall rationale than in terms of their delivery. One can't help feeling that, in relation to the kind of pictures that she evidently wants to make, she still needs to sort out aspects of technique, to refine her grasp of the very basis of how she puts her work together.
