Visual Arts:Aidan Dunne reviews Bunny's Darkness and Other Stories, Decommissioned Camera Series and other works, Ricky Swallowand Wall, Sam Irons
Bunny's Darkness and Other Stories, Atsushi Kaga. Mother's Tankstation, 41-43 Watling St, Ushers Island Thurs-Sat noon-6pm Until June 30 01-6717654
Somehow Atsushi Kaga found his way from Japan to the NCAD in Dublin where he graduated in fine art a couple of years ago. In his degree show he came across as a bright spark with funny-sad works featuring an animal alter-ego, a bunny rabbit, drawn and painted in cartoon style. Having grown to like Dublin, Ash, as he was known in college, decided to stay. As the title of his solo show at Mother's Tankstation suggests, the alter-ego is still at the heart of what he does. Bunny's Darkness and Other Storiesmarshals a formidable array of works, from tiny to huge.
Atsushi's bunny is a hapless, put-upon character, though not at all pathetic or sentimentalised. There's a touch of Woody Allen's comic persona about him, though on numerous levels he relates more obviously to Japanese art. From brush drawings to woodblock prints to Manga comics, a Japanese artist inherits an amazingly strong graphic tradition. What's more, several contemporary Japanese artists have shown an ability to take a childlike, cartoon idiom and invest it with real emotional weight and complexity. For example, the outstanding Yoshitomo Nara paints and sculpts doll-like protagonists who are surprisingly empowered and slyly subversive of the given order of things.
Similarly, Atsushi's Bunny represents the individual struggling to come to terms with the ordinary things in life, growing up in the midst of a perplexing network of rules and relationships, from immediate family to friends and the wider social framework. There are other consistent presences in the work, including a storybook princess and a one-legged bear who might be related to Winnie the Pooh or Paddington. Recurrent themes include wry considerations of troubled father-son relationships and other areas of mutual incomprehension between individuals.
By displacing strong feelings onto fantasy characters, Atsushi is able to maintain a lightness of tone, though it does falter - by design - in his vast eschatological drawing Purgatory, which brings to mind the grandiloquent delivery of Manga illustration combined with the rhetorical excesses of European Romanticism.
Atsushi makes cartoon doodles on scraps of paper and cardboard, more finished drawings and paintings on conventional supports, simple computer animations, and sculptures. His show is strong and it's excellently installed.
Decommissioned Camera Series and other works, Suzanne Mooney. Gallery of Photography, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar Tues-Sat 11am-6pm, Sun 1pm-6pm Until June 15 01-6714654
SUZANNE MOONEY, IN HER exhibition, Decommissioned Camera Series and Other Worksat the Gallery of Photography, deconstructs the language and practice of photography, via photography. The bulk of the show, in terms of space, is given over to an overwhelming, spectacular display of over 400 images of cameras. Each is, we learn, an analogue camera traded in for a digital model. Another single image features a jumbled heap of these cameras casually discarded. They are mostly low-cost, mass-produced models, bright shiny objects in cheerful colours, though there are more expensive, precision-engineered examples as well.
The mass display of cameras is visually and anecdotally interesting but it could be argued that the points it makes are obvious. We live in a consumerist culture in which technological obsolescence and wastefulness are part of the system. Novelty is prized. Cameras are ubiquitous. All this is fairly straightforward and generally recognised. Yet there is something engagingly paradoxic about standing there, looking at myriad photographs of defunct cameras, a simple but effective reversal of the usual arrangement. In her other pieces Mooney is more pointedly analytical of photographic mores.
Make Love to the Camera and Found Photographersare complementary pieces. The former is a sequence of diagrammatic drawings excerpted from manuals on photographing the female nude. The cliches of "glamour" photography are endlessly rehearsed in earnest little drawings, and a sense of unease is gradually imparted through the way the dispassionate, technical images depict the subject's body, with occasional pornographic trappings, as a passive, manipulated object. Found Photographers, meanwhile, consists of reproduced images of male photographers pictured with their fetishised apparatus. While many of the individuals look distinctly nerdish, there is a sense of macho swagger about the display of outsize telephoto lenses and complex gizmos. Mooney's work is impressively well-organised and made, though in the long term her perhaps overly didactic tendency to state the obvious might become unduly limiting.
Ricky Swallow. Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Mon-Fri 11am-6pm, Thurs 11am-7pm, Sat 11am-4.45pm Until June 23 01-8961116
RICKY SWALLOW'S WORK at the Douglas Hyde Gallery is well worth seeing. A young, Melbourne-born artist now based in London, he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2005. He makes carved wood sculptures in which traditional means are allied to quirkily contemporary ends, and he also makes fast-paced works on paper. His sculptures are not only beautifully crafted, they also display a really delicate, felicitous touch with materials. He relishes verisimilitude in his carving, the way a medium can be coaxed to uncannily resemble something in the world while still preserving its own separateness. The effect is to take things out of time, to make them available for meditative speculation.
His remarkable sculptural facility doesn't altogether translate to the two-dimensional work. The paintings on paper, which recall Marlene Dumas, are uneven. However, at their best, they are delivered with real verve - leave out a few of the pieces on view in the Douglas Hyde and the remainder would look much more convincing.
The centrepiece is an allegorical figure of death, a seated skeleton, carved in lime wood, and it illustrates how Swallow's work seems to ignore Modernism and hark back to medieval carving with its stark world view, making it a kind of Australian Gothic. In The Bricoleur, the image of a sneaker caught in the stump of a tree brings to mind the notion of someone lost and perished in the desert. Ideas of death, mortality and transience loom large throughout. Much of the work in the show is apparently informed by the sleeve of the Incredible String Band's 1968 album The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter(considered by many to represent their musical peak), reflecting Swallow's interest in "the countercultural music of the late 1960s". All of which makes sense in context, and is usefully augmented by the Mexican ex-votos and retalbos on view in Gallery 2.
Wall, Sam Irons. Monster Truck Gallery, 73 Francis St Until May 30
Sam Irons's panoramic photographs in Wallat Monster Truck Gallery are landscapes in which the central subject is a work in progress: the prefabricated concrete wall, which will eventually stretch to 750 kilometres, around Gaza. It is described as a necessary security measure by the Israelis and as yet another way of controlling the population and curtailing normal life by the Palestinians. Irons's images are documentary rather than journalistic, and they inevitably bring to mind the existence of comparable if smaller structures in Belfast. The brilliant blue skies, the intense sunlight and the bleached-out colours evoke an exoticism that is starkly contradicted by the mundane, brutal reality of the concrete structure, an emblem of consolidated failure on many, depressing levels.
