VISUAL ARTS/Aidan Dunne: In Jellyfish Lake, the video that is one of the main pieces in Dorothy Cross's fine exhibition Salve at the Kerlin Gallery, we see a sequence of underwater, partial views of a floating woman, her thick hair spread out around her head and shoulders like masses of seaweed.
Reviewed: Salve, Dorothy Cross, Kerlin Gallery until June 29 (01- 6709093), Loss & Memory, Amelia Stein, Rubicon Gallery until July 3 (01- 6708055), On the Edge, Angie Grimes, Bridge Gallery, 6 Upr Ormond Quay until June 25 (01-8729702)
There is a calm, slow-motion quality to the images. Warm sunlight streams through blue-green water and all would be serene were it not for the fact that the woman is floating amid a shoal of jellyfish.
Cutaway shots reveal hundreds, perhaps thousands of the creatures all around. As the woman floats, individual fish of varying sizes, from tiny to alarmingly large, propel themselves inquisitively up to her vulnerably bare flesh. There is obviously a certain tension, here, between her apparent calmness and the proximity of animals which usually represent a threat to the human presence. A sense of idyll is constantly checked by anxiety.
Common sense suggests that these particular fish must not be venomous and thankfully that is the case, though this information is quite rightly not offered as part of the work.
Regardless of knowing or not knowing about the jellyfishes' capacity to sting, the video might be viewed as being about testing and trusting the environment, which is something that we all do, all the time, in different ways. The woman could be either foolishly oblivious or virtuously trustful, depending on your viewpoint. The environment is the symbolically charged one of the sea.
What though, of the hapless jellyfish that form both medium and subject in a series of striking, Joseph Beuys-like drawings? These ethereal, abrasively beautiful, things are, or rather were, venomous, recalling Cross's long-running interest in venomous snakes. The effect is to echo and perhaps heighten the suggestion of risk in the video. Somehow these strange, characteristically astringent images strike a chord with two photographs of Skellig Rock, a jagged, antagonistic tooth in the ocean that paradoxically symbolises refuge and calm.
Cross's magpie eye for found objects and her penchant for retro surrealist flourishes are both exercised in a range of ancillary pieces including the punning Ehre die Frauen and Chatelain (which surely should be Chatelaine?), an extraordinary little bird's nest and a rather grisly Finger Print. One small work consists of a fragment of human skull together with a gold cast of it. In the Jewish cemetery on the Lido, Goethe famously picked up a human skull and rather brilliantly hypothesised that the plates that comprised it were composed of fused vertebrae.
The show's title Salve refers to a word "found in a floorboard in Goethe's house" and a press release suggests that the common thread linking what is an exceptionally diverse collection of pieces is that all explore shades of meaning of the term. In Goethe's fairly pantheistic world view, mind is linked with nature and the woman in Jellyfish Lake might be, then, in her element, at swim in her own consciousness or unconscious, at one with the world.
Amelia Stein's Loss & Memory at the Rubicon Gallery is an intensely personal project. A series of photographs record, item by item, with tender concentration, some of the possessions of her parents, Mona and Mendel, both of whom died within the last five years. The objects, worn with use, are for the most part ordinary things: a battered pair of old training shoes, a garden fork and trowel, a carefully preserved cardboard stationery box, kitchen implements, spice jars. These humble objects seem to coalesce from deep, velvety black shadows in the images, and it is as if they might imminently disappear back into the shadows at any moment.
One can readily identify with Stein when she writes of "trying to weave a safety-net out of the threads" of memories, to give a considered, durable form such fugitive traces.
Collectively these traces bear the consistent imprints of two lives and the photographs cumulatively make up portraits of close, almost palpable absences. The idea of absence is underscored by the recurrent emptiness of the objects as much as by their tenuous visibility.
In their intimacy the pictures are like whispered secrets, and in moving through the deserted house Stein sees herself "secretive as a child" again, exploring the mysteries of her mother's kitchen "full of things that should not be touched.". Strong as the individual pieces are, Loss & Memory, like her last project, The Palm House, is best viewed as a thematic group.
Angie Grimes's landscape-based paintings in her Bridge Gallery exhibition position us literally On the Edge, staring precipitously down to the shoreline where land meets sea. Sometimes we are perched atop a cliff, sometimes our view is from higher still. Grimes so positions us, one feels, because, as her fast, vigorous handling of both paint and print (in a series of carborundum) suggests, she is after the immediacy of the moment, that bracing confrontation with raw air and tough elements. There might also be an intimation of psychological edginess, of being constantly poised on the brink, but the images are generally upbeat and evidence great relish in the process of painting and print-making.
