VISUAL ART: IN HER exhibition at the Limerick City Gallery, A Place to Stay, Gillian Kenny shows work about holiday destinations, the promise of escape and the experience of travelling and being away.
Her paintings, crisply and expertly made, draw on postcard imagery going as far back at the mid-20th century, and her own photographs, taken during travels in the United States and Canada, and of places much closer to her own home in Limerick. Her paintings take on board the visual language of the postcard, rather than revisiting the places depicted. What interests her is the way places are represented and idealised as sites of pleasure. There is a kind of innocence about the earlier postcards, for example, dating from the first flush of modern mass tourism, in which iconic destinations – the Italian Riviera, Venice, even Blackpool – are imbued with exoticism.
Kenny also includes Kilkee, summer resort of choice for many Limerick people, among these destinations. A large proportion of the work addresses something other than destinations in that sense, though. Numerically, most of the paintings describe landscapes of transience, motels and hotels in fairly nondescript, anonymous locations. The idea of being on the road has a particular resonance in North America, and in paying attention to these generic places, often temporary-looking and blandly designed, embellished with advertising signage and pretensions to opulence, Kenny nods to a modern American tradition. It’s perhaps best encapsulated in the work of photographer Stephen Shore who, on several road trips, set out in the 1970s to document the banal reality of towns and cities across the US, revealing an urban landscape that had become invisible by virtue of its sheer familiarity.
The road movie, a specifically American genre, relates back to one of the oldest mythic templates, the quest. To make your way around Kenny’s exhibition is to embark on a quest of sorts. The several different categories of pictures on display allow her space to reflect on the experiences of arrival and departure, of being in transit, of searching for something, perhaps escape in itself. A vintage postcard view of the original terminal at Dublin airport and a muted study of the shadowy platforms at Limerick’s Colbert Station are both thresholds to other possibilities, other worlds. But the festive atmosphere conveyed in the old postcards of New York and Blackpool and the rest is set against the ennui of tawdry, sun-bleached motels and vacant streets.
Yet the opportunity to be rootless, mobile and comfortable is, as Kenny implies, one version of the American Dream. The picture so titled depicts a motel in fading evening light, nothing moving, people in their rooms, cars in the car park, the surface of the swimming pool dead calm. She signifies her scepticism by editing the image so that it includes just the word END from the pool’s cautionary DEEP END sign. At Niagara Falls, as Mike Fitzpatrick points out in his catalogue essay, lines of tourists, clad anonymously in bright yellow waterproof ponchos, describe a circular progress around a wooden walkway. Kenny styles them as pilgrims, in search of a glimpse of something transcendent. They take snaps of the falling water with their digital cameras and mobile phones. But all they can see is a vast cloud of spray. Whatever lies beyond is invisible.
Although, as TS Eliot put it towards the conclusion of his Four Quartets, we shall always explore – " . . . the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive were we started / And know the place for the first time." More recently, Jon Kabat-Zinn expressed it with succinct humour when he titled his well known guide to practical meditation Wherever You Go, There You Are. After our travels with Kenny, where are we? Well, sitting on a seat at the end of Barrington's Pier by the side of the River Shannon in Limerick, perhaps. She offers us not the view from the pier but the pier itself, with its muscular concrete barrier.
Fitzpatrick points out that the pier has been largely cut off by the development of Condell Road, and has become a kind of nowhere. For Limerick people, it’s familiar, it’s home, but it’s also curiously dislocated. Rather than tying things up neatly, as in many a road movie, Kenny leaves things edgy and unresolved.
SUSAN TIGER'S recent exhibition of works on paper at Monster Truck Gallery, What's an American Artist Doing Not Making Paintings of Landscapes in Co Mayo?, set out to answer the question contained in the title. Among other things, she's been making small, wryly amusing drawings and paintings. While she did indeed steer clear of making landscapes per se – as in conventionally picturesque – she is clearly attentive to her surroundings. In fact she's attentive to them in a close-up, detailed way, and her work relishes detail, isolating and elaborating on objects and patterns that tend to be overlooked.
Tiger assumes a freedom of approach or, to look at it from the opposite point of view, never lets herself settle into the comfort of a single, signature style. She will render an ordinary domestic vessel with graphic elegance in one piece and then, in another, deliberately adopt a clunkier, simplified mode of representation, letting the subject decide the style – though overall it’s noticeable that she does like engagingly clunky, schematic images. Workaday objects alternate with abstractions, but there’s no sense of contradiction.
The show worked like a collection of short stories by, say, Laurie Moore, each constituent piece inviting us into its own quite distinct world, each demanding that we adjust our mindset for the duration.
A Place to Stay, paintings by Gillian Kenny. Limerick City Gallery of Art, Carnegie Building, Pery Square Until July 12 061-310633
What's an American Artist Doing Not Making Paintings of Landscapes in Co Mayo?Works on paper by Susan Tiger. Monster Truck Gallery Studios, 73 Francis Street, Dublin June 18-30
