If you happen to make your way along the board-walk on Wellington Quay, between the Ha'penny and Millennium bridges, your eye might be caught by a cluster of white forms on the quay wall opposite
Look again and the cluster resolves itself into a flock of gulls in outline. It is one of Gillian Kane's site-specific drawings. The image of the flock refers both to the gulls swooping along the river and the people, and to the traffic, bustling non-stop along the quays above.
Kane's work is one of the pieces that make up Shift, the visual arts strand of the Fringe, curated by Mark Garry and featuring six projects in all, by young Dublin artists. Kane's work is a subtle intervention into the city's fabric, something you might walk by without a second glance, and as such seems to be very much in keeping with Garry's thinking. He notes that contemporary art is not a popular cultural form. Rather than aiming for the impact of mass-media forms, public art should opt for "subtle and covert methodologies", he says. Hence Neva Elliott's satirical imitation of the products of therapeutic culture, her branded lines of Self-Amendment and Self- Assessment pharmaceuticals, which you can encounter by chance or design, in Gruel in Dame Street, or at the more conventional venues. Or M.J. Whelan's big, distinctly unimposing photographs, which don't try to sell us anything to such an extent that we are left wondering just what's in it for them. They are a bit like anti-advertising, and best when seen outside, in the context of the streetscape.
Or there is the complimentary CD, by Karl Him + Chequerboard (available to anyone who cares to pick up a copy of the free Shift catalogue), which takes acoustic material from the environs of the Quays, Shift's designated territory, and reshapes it for our leisurely consideration.
Yet Shift is also, a bit incongruously, concentrated in the conventional gallery-like spaces of the SS Michael and John (formerly the Viking Museum) and Project. The former venue is only open from 5 p.m. in the evening, which doesn't help accessibility. Here, Ciara Healy's cut-out butterflies pinned in spacious vitrines take up perhaps too much space - wouldn't one display be more effective? As images of fugitive and lost time, her fragmentary snapshots and other ephemeral material are effective. Also displayed in glass cases are props from Tim Lloyd's Jackass-like video stunts: a DIY diving suit and oven tins which serve as makeshift skis.
The video is projected nightly on Wellington Quay, and also screened, on a monitor, at Project. It is agreeably diverting, but without a doubt it is entirely consistent with the language of MTV, which shows just how difficult it is to try to outflank an omnivorous medium like television. All of the constituents of Shift make a good case for themselves, but the obvious risk of producing something with an inbuilt quality of "take it or leave it, blink and you'll miss it", is that the audience might opt to leave it, or might just blink and miss it.
Aidan Dunne
Shift continues until October 12th
