VISUAL ARTS / AIDAN DUNNE: Reviewed - A Film Trilogy, Clare Langan: RHA Gallery II and III until March 30th (01-6612558); Grasping the Sparrow's Tail, Michael Boran: Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until March 8th (01-8740064); Favela Vila Prudente, Brian Maguire: Kerlin Gallery until March 15th (01-6709093)
Each of the works that make up Clare Langan's trilogy of short films at the RHA reinforce a single, shared, core narrative.
Each is in many respects a distinct variation on this one, concise narrative pattern. In all of the films, an unidentified protagonist, usually glimpsed obliquely, tries to reach a place of safety in a hostile environment and is repulsed. Though the nature of the environment differs radically from film to film, they are all post-apocalyptic and seem to pretty much rule out the possibility of a human presence.
In the first, Forty Below, we are plunged into a frozen, flooded world. A figure emerges from the sea in search of refuge but is eventually driven back into the water again. By contrast, the desert is swallowing up human habitation and cultivation in Too Dark For Night. Here the protagonist traverses a desert to find a town overwhelmed by the advancing sands. Glass Hour, the most recently completed, presents a picture of an organised, industrialised world being submerged by what might be a vast lava flow.
Although the scale of the landscapes in the films is uniformly vast, Langan recurrently and unobtrusively uses the image of an intimate, potentially welcoming domestic space that turns out to be threatened and uninhabitable. The symbolic presence of the individual figure, together with the motif of symbolically ruined domesticity, underline the central idea that we are not just witnessing the aftermath of a remote catastrophe - as is usually the case in an age of electronic media. In other words, Langan is trying to undercut our televisual inclination to see ourselves as occupying a comfortable here in relation to a catastrophic there. And she does that very effectively by prompting our identification with her forlorn protagonists and by the categorical denial of refuge. There is simply no place for us in the worlds she evokes.
They are, incidentally, strikingly visualised and beautiful in an eerie, slightly menacing way. Her distinctive use of customised, hand-painted filters and her willingness to take liberties with photographic veracity ensure that the film image becomes in her hands a remarkably pliable medium, capable of extreme distortion. This too ties us subjectively into her skewed imaginative world. The most obvious interpretation of the trilogy is as a group of cautionary ecological parables. Nature will overwhelm whatever efforts people make to tame the universe. We are not really at home there. Yet the work could be read in other ways, it could, for example, be about how we relate not to the catastrophic but to the strangeness of the everyday.
Michael Boran's Grasping the Sparrow's Tail is an exhibition of photographs that explore the fleeting interactions between people and places in terms of momentary alignments and fugitive traces. That might sound a bit vague, and it is actually difficult to articulate what precisely it is that Boran does with his images, but they do have a beautifully light, magical touch and are clearly the products of a real visual intelligence.
In one sequence, people are distributed across a paved square in Seville like pieces on a chessboard. In Echo, it is as if stone steps remember the footsteps of someone descending. Footprints features an amazing conglomeration of criss-crossing, overlapping prints. Ladder is an extraordinary study of the excavated interior of a building, and it is a great photograph. All these images have in common a preoccupation with surface and marks. There are layers upon layers of both. Throughout, there is a real sense of Boran closing in on something, searching for an image. Usually photographs are editioned, but the exhibition list notes that all of these pieces are one-offs.
Brian Maguire's Favela Vila Prudente at the Kerlin Gallery represents another stage in a project initiated in 1998 when he first visited São Paulo in Brazil.
There he explored the world of the Favelas, or shanty towns, and made a series of portrait drawings of children from one particular town, Vila Prudente. This show consists of casual colour photographs of those drawings taken in situ, in the children's homes.
We don't see anything of the occupants apart from the likenesses in the drawings, and there is something sad and wistful about the vacant domestic spaces inhabited only by these ghostly traces. It is as if Maguire is opening up the question of what might have happened to his portrait subjects since he made the drawings, but then opts to leave the question open. It could be that he prefers to leave us wondering, knowing that these are real people, with the odds stacked against them.
