VISUAL ARTS/Reviewed: Free From The Itch Of Desire, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, until July 25th (056-7761106) Corpus: Women Artists And Embodiment, Limerick City Gallery of Art, until July 15th (061-310633)
The work that makes up the Butler Gallery's Free From The Itch Of Desire has in common a quality of understatement. It includes pieces by four individual artists (plus a fifth who had a collaborative role in relation to one of them).
They are all, in their different ways, subtly engaging, so subtly that you have to be willing to give them time. All have come out of London colleges, and it's hard not to think of the previous generation of YBAs, of animal carcasses in formaldehyde and other sensation-seeking feats. It's as if these younger artists are consciously taking another route.
Perhaps picking up on this, Nathalie Weadick, the show's curator, has in mind art that eschews extremes of expression. But rather than forsaking narrative and other content in favour of pure form - the sense in which her title phrase was originally enlisted by advocates of abstract formalism - the work she's chosen is wryly aware of the pitfalls of disengagement and excessive engagement alike. Not that the artists are shy and retiring, incidentally. There is a subversive, challenging element to pretty much everything in the show.
The slyly self-effacing work of Susan Collis probably best exemplifies the mood. She uses painstaking craft and subterfuge to create effects that we mistake for accidents of time and carelessness, special effects of a kind. Alarming-looking cracks in the gallery wall are carefully mimicked; paint splashes and drips are inscribed on the wall as though a latter-day Jackson Pollock has been at work on a now absent canvas; a perfectly maintained door is carefully painted to give evidence of wear and tear. Collis prompts a double take and reflections on futility, the idea of perfection and time.
Vanessa O'Reilly's sound installation, which evolved to accommodate the space, takes and amplifies the sounds generated by manipulating a record and uses it to redefine - in fact to attack - the fabric of the gallery space: witness the irregular gaps in the pattern of roof tiles. Eline McGeorge and Ann Course (the latter working with Paul Clark) both show work that reflects a current vogue for informal, conspicuously high-low-tech animation.
McGeorge, though, is more concerned with space. Her animated sequences refer to spaces and forms in landscape that she then extends or revisits in terms of composite sequences of drawings on paper and directly onto the wall. Course's short narrative sequences of animated line drawings are apparently whimsical and cartoonish but usually reveal a darker undercurrent as they progress. Which is not a bad description of the effect of the show as a whole.
Corpus: Women Artists And Embodiment, at Limerick City Gallery, is the first exhibition based on research under the auspices of the Shinnors Scholarship by curator Pippa Little. She has drawn on work in public collections throughout the country to make a thematic show.
The practice of categorising work on the basis of gender has provoked a certain amount of debate in the past, but in the context it is entirely reasonable. It could be argued, though, that in its linkage of work to theme, in terms of layout and presentation Corpus errs on the side of didacticism.
Having said that, it's only fair to acknowledge that it is in part what might be called a teaching exhibition. And it functions very well as a primer, not only in strategies of representation of the female and femininity in contemporary art but also, effectively, in varieties of contemporary art practice.
Little deploys the work in five sections through the five discrete temporary exhibition spaces of the gallery's ground floor.
We first encounter pieces that are exemplary of women's reappropriation of their own images, including very forceful and affirmative representations by Alice Maher and Rita Duffy.
Often they involve references to classical mythology and the mainstream tradition of Western painting, as in Amanda Coogan's baleful Medea and Amy O'Riordan's haughty figure in a solitary Bacchanalia.
Next come works that treat women's experiences and identities as reflected in domestic and social spaces, usually in terms of the subversion of objects, environments and roles, as with Dorothy Cross's table, Rita Duffy's porcupine Sofa or Sally Maidment's wallpaper, with its unorthodox patterning.
Often, in this work, what we assume to be neutral or innocuous is revealed to be anything but. As it happens, as far as the work itself goes, the divisions between this and succeeding sections - notions of public and private, and rupture - are tenuous.
Photographs documenting Marina Abramovic's performance pieces, notably the bloody Lips Of Thomas, still have the capacity to shock. They come from a heroic, exploratory era of performance, when extreme tests of endurance, often with ritualistic associations, restored the body to the centre of the visual arts.
Although they are located in different rooms, there is an interesting empathy between Abramovic and Dorothy Cross's Jellyfish Lake, which also explores the body's limits, if in quite a different vein.
Cross's ambiguous Croquet, with its emphasis on layers of meaning encoded in ritual, is appropriately sited in the pristine white cube of the gallery's extension wing, like a commentary on the leakage of postmodernity into the exclusive space of high modernity.
There are other strong works, including Neva Elliott's explorations of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Live action is central to performance, and Corpus features one, by Amanda Coogan.
It also features the active participation of the local Our Lady of Lourdes Active Group and other events and marks an auspicious first for the Shinnors Scholarship.
