Reviewed
Dubliners, National Photographic Archive, ongoing (01-6030371)
Anatomy of Discomfort, The Blue Leaf Gallery, Marino Mart, Fairview until July 19th (01-8333456)
Bodyscapes, Hallward Gallery until July 12 (01-6621482)
Scandalous Art, Origin Gallery, ends today (01-4785159)
As Dr J.J. Clarke's photograph of road-works at the top of Grafton Street in Dublin illustrates, the more things change the more they stay the same. Clarke's picture was taken around the turn of the 19th century and it is one of a remarkable collection of comparable photographs, over 70 of which make up an exhibition with the inevitable Joycean reference in the title, Dubliners at the National Photographic Archive in Temple Bar. The images, selected from a total of some 300 prints and glass plates, make up a fascinating snapshot of a lost era.
Clarke's work comes under the category of street photography. That is, it is life on the street, rather than urban topography, that interested him and he excelled at capturing the flavour of daily life in the city. While they are artless in the sense that they never consciously try to be arty, the images have an ease and casualness remarkable for their time - and impressive for any time.
Their straightforwardness gives them great immediacy. Despite the depredations wrought on the fabric of the city in the meantime, most of the places he photographed are recognisable, and it is immediately striking how much quieter Dublin was then - if hardly surprising. You get a sense of an entirely different pace and rhythm to city life.
It is thought that Clarke made the photographs when he was a medical student. He went on to practise medicine as a ship's doctor, eventually returning to his home town, Castleblaney, prior to the second World War. Sadly, after his death, a relative dumped hundreds of his glass plates. What remained were donated to the Archive by his nephew, and they comprise something of a photographic treasure trove.
Clarke's stamping ground was a predictable circuit encompassing Westmoreland St, Grafton St, Merrion Sq and St Stephen's Green, a part of town that, with just one minor diversion to Temple Bar, today contains the vast majority of Dublin's commercial art galleries. While one small cluster of galleries - the Davis, Kevin Kavanagh and The Bridge - have a toehold on the north-side of the river, they are exceptions to the rule.
So the opening of The Blue Leaf Gallery last week, not only on the north-side but on Marino Mart in Fairview, is noteworthy. It is run by Cathy Boyle (late of the Oisin Gallery) and artist Ciara Gibbons, a graduate of Cork's Crawford College and their inaugural solo show Anatomy of Discomfort, features the work of another Crawford artist, painter Suzy O'Mullane.
Her subject is the human figure and her show consists of a series of large scale charcoal drawings and a series of oil paintings. The same few models, differently attired, recur from work to work, particularly the sinewy, dark, long-haired Paula. While the drawings are boldly made, with strong tonal contrasts, the paintings are altogether more muted affairs.
O'Mullane heads instinctively for muddied mid tones, and one result is that her paintings, though vigorously worked with lots of animation in the surface, can seem so subdued that it's easy to miss their quiet strengths. The show's title refers to the edge of unease that she actively seeks out in her sitters. In her own thoughtfully determined way, she survives the inevitable comparison with Lucian Freud, a clear influence.
Jacinta Feeney's series of Bodyscapes at the Hallward Gallery conform to a relentlessly uniform format. The feeling of relentlessness arises largely because there are too many pieces in the show. Nevertheless, the central idea is good and Feeney's execution is generally sound.
The work depends on an image that is a confluence of body, landscape, book and knowledge. In a statement, Feeney notes that she is concerned with a world in which the body (and, her work implies though she doesn't actually say it, the landscape as well) is filtered and fragmented through unprecedented layers of representation. Further, the meanings of landscape and bodies are determined by various specialised interests and an overall cultural context.
She visualises this state of affairs as the open pages of a book, a fixed framework which continually struggles to order and contain things - bodies and landscapes - that insist on being variously disorderly, amorphous, out of focus, ambiguous and capricious. At times the opened book is recognisably the displayed, splayed, opened body or landscape, at times the connection is less overt and often the unruly organic distorts the clean-edged format. If all this sounds unduly schematic it should be said that there is a distinctly lyrical quality to Fenny's palette of reds and pinks and yellows.
The Origin Gallery is hosting a show by three Scandinavian-based artists. South African born Doris Bloom is based in Denmark and is an immensely fluent and accomplished printmaker. In fact, though her work encompasses a diversity of means and media, including collage, photography and painting, and is characterised by an omnivorous curiosity and openness, she seems most at home with line, and her signature touch is lively, spontaneous and thread-like. In the end it is that nervy touch that keeps us interested rather than the conceptual underpinnings of such pieces as Sketching out of Bloom's Chronology.
The work of Carl Magnus (he is Swedish), by contrast, is rigorously geometric and controlled. He makes flat, shaped, hard-edged abstracts in subdued colours, the kind of work that tasteful and well made if a little anonymous. A Finn, Alvar Gullichsen, is the joker in the pack. His The Bath Room installation is an inventive whimsical creation with some nice surreal touches. His prints are garish, comic-book images with a gruesome, body-based humour.
