Susan MacWilliam's exhibition On The Eye at the Butler Gallery is made up of four distinct pieces, but three of them overlap and interconnect in such a mutually enriching way that they comprise a virtual composite, a consistent, overall experience. These three pieces are video installations, and all are extremely atmospheric, an habitual strength of MacWilliam's work. The last piece, a series of still stereoscopic images, exhibits another habitual quality, a hard-edged, forensic detachment.
Photographed in Belfast under piercing bright light and against an impossibly blue sky - the proverbial blue sky of Ulster? - they feature commercial signs and functional objects, respectively illustrative of the decorative and the functional. Given the way the images are presented in a series of stereoscopic viewers, there could also be anthropomorphic implications. That is to say, we could read these resolutely unpeopled scenes as symbolising human attributes, but while certainly plausible, such a symbolism is oblique and unforced.
MacWilliam, born in Belfast and still based there, is a young artist whose work has long evidenced a fascination with the optical technologies of the exploratory period of photography and the moving image. Historically, and very much in her work, this period coincides with interest in the unconscious and occult phenomena, concerns that were often, it seems, related to a distinctly male unease with what is or might be going on in women's heads and bodies.
It would be unfair to describe the video pieces at the Butler, because their striking, pervasive sense of brooding mystery derives in part from the uncertainty of what we are, at various stages, looking at. But, without being specific about sequence and progression, it is noticeable that the thick, opaque mist that covers the lush, drenched mountain landscape in one piece, and the white-hot strands of lightning in another, oddly but unmistakably recall the ectoplasmic white stuff that featured in an earlier piece about the Portsmouth medium Helen Duncan. All refer to the uncanny, to something unseen that becomes momentarily and, for various reasons, strangely visible. The flickering patterns of a rotating fan in the third piece echo the zoetrope, an early device for creating the illusion of moving images, that MacWilliam has used previously. You are not likely to see this show in its present form anywhere else - it depends on the physical design of the gallery - so it is well worth the effort of catching it here.
In previous exhibitions, at the Ashford Gallery and Newbridge's Riverbank Arts Centre, Makiko Nakamura has proved herself adept at handling imposingly large-scaled paintings. A protracted process of making and erasing produces, in these large works, polished impassive surfaces that, with their residual grid-based compositions and sheer, foliated layering, convey a sense of time lived and time lost. The domestic spaces of the Peppercanister Gallery, where she is currently showing, see her experimenting with a variety of smaller formats, with just a couple of excursions to greater size, including a nine-part grid.
Nakamura employs a stringently limited palette in generally monochromatic colour schemes. Blue is one staple. Apart from that, black, silver and gold rule the roost. Gold is a rarity, and creates a certain tension in that it implies a decorative luxuriance not otherwise evident, even in the silver paintings, preferring as the artist evidently does the richness that derives from austerity. Nevertheless, she could not be accused of indulging a decorative inclination. Like several other works in what is a fine show, her Charcoal Grey Diptych, with its rigorous horizontal banding, is a small picture with big presence.
Paul O'Keeffe's Mallarme/Auden/Flaubert at Temple Bar Gallery (the actual title depends on a Scrabble-like connection of these three names, graphically presented) is a painstakingly conceived, carefully considered and expertly produced exhibition. O'Keeffe has stocked the gallery with a disparate group of objects fashioned from a variety of materials, including cast aluminium, plastic and plexiglass, that are pointedly redolent more of modernity and mass production than artisanship.
These unorthodoxly beautiful objects come freighted with cargoes of theory. O'Keeffe comes across as keen to elaborate on but also cagily, warily watchful about possible meanings and interpretations. Among the ideas he engages with is the notion that the work writes the author, in the sense that Flaubert, rather than being someone who wrote a number of books, is to us a product of our collective reading of his work, a signifier of certain literary qualities, historical trends and so on.
O'Keeffe doesn't approach such ideas narrowly or didactically, but maintains the freedom to treat a subject on any level or from an angle that takes his fancy. Hence his surprising and, it must be said, obscure range of references that, while convincingly and wittily employed, necessitate an accompanying, explanatory commentary, as when he hints at Flaubert's satirical point in Bouvard and Pecuchet by using a William Morris fabric pattern. How, you ask, does that hint at Flaubert's satirical intent? This and other interpretative questions are carefully answered in Natasha Levinson's accompanying notes. The fact that you really do have to read them to get the most from the work - and the work really is worth the effort - is arguably symptomatic of a sizeable strand of contemporary art in indicating a power-shift from making to interpretation. But there are also gains for making, seen in some good, Antony Gormley-like approaches to conveying a sense of the body in a technological world, and O'Keeffe's consistently inventive use of various areas of visual language.
Reviewed
Susan MacWilliam, On the Eye, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny until May 5th(056-61106); Makiko Nakamura, Paintings, Peppercanister Gallery until April 30th (01-6611279); Paul O'Keeffe, Mallarme/Auden/Flaubert, Temple Bar Gallery until May 18th (01-6710073)
