VISUAL ARTS/REVIEWS: Aidan Dunne reviews "See It . . . Read It" in Draíocht, Blanchardstown, until May 29th (01-8852610), "Via 2", Camden Street, Dublin, until May 22nd (086-3963845) and "Anois Ar Theacht An tSamhraidh", Pearse Family Home, Dublin, ends tomorrow (01-8722296)
The exhibition that Carissa Farrell has curated at Draíocht, called See It . . . Read It . . ., is based on a simple idea: bring together a selection of works by visual artists that depend significantly on the written word. Organised with the British Council, the show draws on the council's collection at the Hayward Gallery in London, allowing access to a range of names familiar as Young British Artists and from further afield, including the well-known US aphorist Jenny Holzer and the German artist Katharina Fritsch.
In highlighting the written word close to the Bloomsday centenary, Farrell is referring to the pre-eminence of Ireland's literary heritage, routinely used to disparage our level of visual literacy. Get to Draíocht and you can see The Simple Truth, a Tracey Emin bed - or at least a bed adorned with a blanket appliquéd by Emin with the words: "Tracey Emin: Here To Stay". Although she defends the quality of the craft of her work, she wouldn't win any prizes on that basis.
The show features an iconic YBA work, Simon Patterson's The Great Bear. Based on the map of the London Underground, it substitutes for stations the names of individuals renowned in a number of fields. It's clever and oddly engrossing, and it's also notable because it still stands as Patterson's main claim to fame. Nothing he's done before or since matches its inspired inventiveness.
It's notable that several pieces encourage a more critical engagement with received ideas: Ross Sinclair's T-Shirt Paintings 1-80, for example, with their idiosyncratic slogans, or Emma Kay's The World From Memory No 3, in which she tries to draw an accurate map of the world. There are also outstanding works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sylvie Fleury and Marion Coutts. It is an extremely accessible and provocative show.
Last year Via was an initiative by artists based in and around Camden Street in Dublin. By locating artworks in the fabric of the street, they acknowledged the importance of the locale to their work and reflected on the way that work related to its immediate social context. The area, vibrant and heterogeneous, has a distinctive and evolving character, reflecting aspects of the quintessential old Dublin together with the flux of the new.
This year's sequel, Via 2, marks a significant refinement of the project. The same core group, including Susan Gogan, Sarah O'Toole and Sally Timmons, with an invited adjudicator, the artist Declan Kennedy, have facilitated a series of measured, tactful interventions on the part of 19 or so artists.
Many of these interventions are extremely subtle, arguably to a fault but usually effectively. Alan Mongey has put tiny figurines in various public spaces, to be picked up, walked on, washed away, puzzled over, whatever. Nina Tanis has highlighted the copious blobs of discarded chewing gum by painting them with bright colours.
In the window of Tiger Lily flower shop Deirdre Molloy adapts the conventions of advertising in an image that points, gently, to the human role in global warming and its potential consequences.
Equally apposite in its siting is Rhona Byrne's Passport Skies, a grid of passport-sized photographs of skies in the window of Falcon Travel. The format and the images comment on the promise of travel, the lure of an exotic elsewhere, the desire for escape. Matthew Beattie and Áine Ryan's International Newspaper Reading Stand is as it says, a simple acknowledgment of a trend towards multiculturalism.
David Dunne's installation The Memory Of Water is a succinct, atmospheric meditation on our relationship to the historical past, specifically the Holocaust, brought palpably close by his inventive use of ordinary materials. It's particularly good in context, because Camden Street is home to several charity shops. In one of them, run by the Irish Cancer Society, you will find Majella Clancy's paintings of clothing. They are small, intricately patterned white images. Beautiful in themselves, they also prompt a reflection on the human history of the items all around.
Startling and enigmatic, Andy Fung's wall paintings, The Elements - sleek, stylised images of strange, insectlike creatures - have an odd, compelling quality when you come upon them in the alleyway next to West Coast Coffee. It's unlikely that you will see or experience every element of Via 2, and it's possible you'll just happen on one or two and won't even notice others, but as a site-specific event it makes a good case for itself and is well worth sampling.
Part of the Pearse Family Home, at 27 Pearse Street in Dublin, is now an intermittent venue for exhibitions. The open-roofed car park to the rear of the house was once the workshop for the family stone-cutting business. All things being equal, Pádraig and his brother Willie might have followed their father in to this business. The sculptors Cliodna Cussen and Benedict Byrne had the bright idea of organising a sculpture exhibition of, mostly, stone carving, to note the site's former use and to mark last weekend's accession of 10 countries to the EU.
The resultant show, "Anois Ar Theacht An tSamhraidh", includes a piece by Willie Pearse plus work by close to 30 other Irish artists, as well as a piece by an artist from each of the 10 new EU countries. Byrne is known as a stone carver, but, as it happens, he shows not a carving but a very good figure modelled in clay. That so many works are concentrated in a relatively small space - just two domestic rooms - means the scale is uniformly small. Which in turn means you get to see a great deal of sculpture with a minimum of effort, most of it for sale at very reasonable prices. Eileen McDonagh, SeáHillen, Gerard Cox and Orla de Brí are among those who come up trumps.
