Visual Arts: Reviewed - Pine Valley, Robert Adams, and KF Schobinger, drawings. Douglas Hyde Galleries 1 and 2 until Nov 18 (01-8961116); The Bank, The CBFSAI Art Project 2006, Michael Boran, Michael Durand, David Farrell, Gallery of Photography until Oct 22 (01-6714654)
Robert Adams's Pine Valley at the Douglas Hyde Gallery is presented as a story in at least two senses. One is the outline of the exhibition. Adams is well known for his landscape photography, which is always thoughtful and intensely felt. He has many numerous studies of deforested landscapes in the United States, and the genesis of the work in this show is that, one day, documenting expanses of such terrain near Hell's Canyon in Oregon, he came upon the valley that gives the show its title. It was, though, no longer a valley of pines. They had long gone, having been clear- felled. What lifted his heart was the fact that the valley had been colonised by a new generation of trees, cottonwoods and fruit trees.
The valley is an oasis in a desert of deforestation, a secret garden that symbolises the potential for the beauty and regeneration that can emerge despite environmental depredation. That is one story, but the show is also presented in the form of another story, the story of a day, in effect, which chronicles the discovery and exploration of the valley. It begins with scenes of deforested hillsides and views of the tips of mature trees, and progresses through a descent into the valley and meandering progress through its mix of trees and grasses. It concludes with nightfall and views of a beautiful starry sky.
It's a calm, and calming, process. There is a sense of Adams soaking up the import of what he's looking at gradually, letting any particular view sink in. In this his photographs are the antithesis of the popular photographic ideal of capturing the decisive moment.
He is patiently attentive to the texture of masses of leaves fluttering in a breeze, for example, to the extent that you can feel the breeze and virtually hear the rustle of the leaves. His images are black-and-white silver gelatin prints, a venerable technique in photographic terms, and one presumes he uses a large format camera, even though the prints are small in scale. Tonally subtle, they are hard to reproduce. Yet the narrative frameworks do raise unanswered questions.
There are signs, for example, that the valley has been carefully husbanded. We see fencing, and the grass has been neatly cropped around groves of trees. A cabin is visible in some photographs, and is enticing in this exceptional setting. The apparent isolation of the habitation, and the exceptional quality of the surroundings, invite inquiry. One of the interesting ideas raised is the very notion of isolation in an era of exponential population growth and the apparently unstoppable rise of vast urban centres.
It is as if Adams is mapping out a revised, pragmatic version of a garden of Eden, celebrating the compromises that might still be available to us even though we have managed to make an incredible mess of things. Clear-felling, yes, he seems to say, mile after mile of scarred landscape, but look, there's still a chance of something better.
There's nothing sentimental about his view of nature, either, which gives his work a certain toughness. He is encouraging us to look at what could be called ordinary beauty, but with enhanced awareness.
Adams's work is complemented by an unusually dense display of many small images in the Gallery 2 exhibition devoted to the work of KF Schobinger, an uncle of Bernhard Schobinger, some of whose jewellery has previously featured in the same gallery. KF, who lived from 1879 to 1951, was a painter, but apart from his mainstream work he made many visionary and mystical images, and it is the latter that feature here.
They are mostly in the form of small, intricately worked drawings, tonally dark with highlights. They draw us into an imaginary world of myth and ritual in which communities engage in strange ceremonies and individuals are pitted against a variety of animals and find their way in the world in ways that recall standard mythic archetypes.
Schobinger's menagerie of animals is particularly striking. There are some beautiful drawings of creatures extant and extinct and fantastical. In all, the work can be read as a symbolic way of approaching individual experience in the world, in a way that makes it a good companion piece to Adams's photographs.
The Bank at the Gallery of Photography marshals the fruits of a project involving Michael Boran, Michael Durand and David Farrell, and the Central Bank. Each artist was invited to make a body of work relating in some way to the bank, and each came up with a distinctive approach. Durand's is probably the most clearly conceptualised contribution. He photographed a number of bank personnel adjacent to piles of decommissioned and shredded banknotes.
The size of each pile derived from a statistic of the subjects choosing, such as the average annual individual donation to charity - a small stack of paper fragments, as you can imagine. The idea prompted one witty response from a security guard who is posed beside a sizable heap of paper: the amount defining the tax-free threshold of artists' income in Ireland. If there is a weakness here it is that the portraits themselves are very ordinary.
There is some cross-over between Boran and Farrell. The former chronicles everyday traffic across the Plaza and steps outside. These strongly graphic images describing random fluctuations invite comparison with the abstract movements of money inside the building.
Boran also provides us with a view from inside out in a beautiful panoramic composition. Farrell's images document the deserted interior at night and are strongly atmospheric, an effect enhanced by his video. There is a slightly ominous quality to his footage of a building that never sleeps.
