Reviewed: RHA 171st Annual Exhibition, Royal Hibernian Acadey Gallagher Gallery until May 12 (01-6612558); Harvester, Patricia Looby; Temple Bar Gallery until May 13 (01-6710073);
Monitor, Anthony Haughey, Paul Nulty and John Drew, Gallery of Photography until May 30 (01-6714654)
With 400-plus exhibits, there is a lot to enjoy at this year's RHA Annual show. The event really has been turned around throughout the last decade, so that it is no longer surprising to encounter, as part of it, a big, uncompromising Richard Gorman abstract, or photographs (previously beyond the pale) by Fergus Bourke, Rod Tuach, Ruth McHugh and others. Yet if you incline towards the art of the chocolate box top, a product of the lingering, long-term influence of Post-Impressionism that threatened at one stage to overwhelm the academy, there is still plenty of that for you to enjoy, supplied by such reliable academic contributors as Desmond Carrick, James Nolan and Brett McEntagart.
Modelled partly, perhaps, on the RA, the RHA now aims for a lively, inclusively tolerant selection. Links with Scotland are consolidated with James Morrison's thinly brushed big skies, delivered with considerable expertise, plus outstanding work by Barbara Rae and Elizabeth Blackadder. Among the home-grown highlights is Martin Gale's Avalon, featuring a pristine suburban bungalow deposited in a spectacular mountain setting. It is a typically strong piece of sociological observation, not at all facile.
In a different vein, Bernadette Kiely has a comparable feeling for the wet, rural landscape in her Wet Earth. There is a virtuoso work by Colin Harrison, and a beautiful landscape, the serenely poised Sea Margin Aughrus, by Barbara Warren. In Andrey Tarkovsky's film Mirror there's an extraordinary moment when a sudden gust of wind ripples through a wheat field, and that kind of magical, serendipitous instant is effectively evoked in Veronica Bolay's radiant landscape compositions. The lushness of Barrie Cooke's small lake study belies the fact that its subject is pollution.
Clement McAleer really lets rip with one of his expansive landscape studies, while Gene Lambert is all muted restraint with his panoramic triptych, Landscape Fragment. Also noteworthy are Peter Collis's moody studies of Wicklow, and landscape based pieces by Lynda Hamilton and Judy Hamilton. Bridget Flannery's large abstract composition is very convincing. Graham Gingles shows two very good, sombre box constructions. That maestro of quick-witted, life-sizes assemblage, Patrick O'Reilly, is making small bronzes, and very well too.
The annual crop of portraits, usually of men in suits or uniform, is a staple of the academy show. Apart from the usual fare, Michael O'Dea has a very good portrait drawing of fellow artist Samuel Walsh, and Blaise Smith dispenses with convention by situating his sitter, Prof Patrick Lynch, in the lower right-hand corner of the composition. Incidentally, Smith also shows a fine study of one of the housing estates, in Waterford, that have proliferated throughout Ireland. There's an astute, small self portrait by Jenny Richardson, a quietly impressive study.
One of the best figurative pieces at the RHA is Mark O'Kelly's untitled figure composition, a carefully neutral account of what might be a magazine illustration. His solo show, just ended at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, was an engaging display of cool representation, in which he explored a range of typical contemporary urban spaces and motifs, Nicholson Baker type settings like concourses, atriums, terraces. The paintings were nicely offhand, distanced and yet curiously involving, perhaps because we know these unremarked spaces so well. In his treatment O'Kelly played with technologies of photographic and print reproduction. There were also nice, unforced hints of narrative frameworks, as in Car, a high-angled view of a car with one door open.
PATRICIA Looby's Harvester at the Temple Bar Gallery is perhaps excessively methodical, carefully paced out, though still a very strong show, which includes paintings, installation and found objects.
Cumulatively, you get the feeling that she has pursued every possible line of enquiry suggested by her material with patient exactitude. Which, all in all, takes from rather than adds to the overall effect, as though she were continually hammering home her point. There is a repetitious, over-argued quality to the pieces of work that make up the show, but at the same time they are, individually, beautifully and sensitively made, with, to use the term judiciously, great charm. The seed, singly or en masse, becomes for her a versatile symbol encompassing the cyclical, regenerative processes that characterise life, living and art.
Though this is billed as her first major solo show, she is clearly an artist of considerable strength and ability who we should see more of.
MONITOR, at the Gallery of Photography, is a collaborative venture by Anthony Haughey, Paul Nulty and John Drew. A terrific piece of photographic and video installation, it takes a cool look at the increasingly pervasive climate of environmental surveillance within which we live. The notion of the Panoptikon, the prison in which the prisoner is the object of comprehensive surveillance, is one of the dominant ideas in contemporary visual art, as well as an inspiration to prison designers, totalitarian rulers and, oddly enough, the authorities in liberal democracies.
Yet for the most part the fantasy of the omniscient, omnipotent observer remains pretty much that, a fantasy. The real horror of the CCTV footage of infant Jamie Bulger being led away by his killers is that all the surveillance in the world doesn't stop things from happening. When it comes to technology, it can be difficult to sort the facts from the hype, but generally the hype seems to win out. This show reaches into these areas provocatively and inventively. A bank of images, portraits of the watchers watched, the various police and security operatives who direct and observe the monitors, make up one of its most compelling elements.
