Visual Arts/Reviewed: Not the Full Story Rubicon Gallery, 10 St Stephen's Green Tues-Sat noon-6pm Until Mar 3 (01-6708055) Trudie Mooney Solomon Gallery, Powerscourt Townhouse, South William St Mon-Sat 10am-5.30pm Until Feb 6 (01-6794237) Cora Cummins, Sarah Durcan, Tadhg McSweeney, Nevan Lahart, Geraldine O'Neill and Alison Pilkington. Kevin Kavanagh, 66 Great Strand St Until Feb 3 (01-8740064)
In Not the Full Story at the Rubicon Gallery, Maud Cotter appropriates ordinary domestic items, including a spindly-legged table and fine china, and subverts their ordinariness by means of ambiguous, mischievous sculptural interventions. Such a description - subverting the meaning of ordinary things through strategic intervention - could apply to a significant proportion of all contemporary art. What Cotter seems to have specifically in mind is the idea of a hidden, unseen dimension to things. That is, within the elaborate apparatus and ritual of domestic routine, there is implicit a cumulative wealth of human feeling and experience.
Although her show is made up of a number of individual pieces, they collectively evoke an overall, cohesive space of contained domesticity, a recognisable world.
Objects accumulate histories in visible or documented ways, such as through signs of wear and tear, by virtue of provenance, or their location in chronicles of aesthetic fashion, but Cotter wants to elaborate on invisible histories. To do so she has settled on notions relating to possession and the uncanny. Genteel teacups spout geysers of what could be an approximation of mediumistic ectoplasm. The table legs extend to unusable proportions and its mirrored surface reflects strange goings-on on the ceiling above. Things, as they say, take on a life of their own, humorous but potentially malicious.
There is an echo here of the way Susan MacWilliam has explored related, overlapping territory in a striking series of installations and other works, often incorporating film and performance elements, though obviously Cotter's approach is more object-centred, which imposes constraints on what is possible. This is noticeable in that the idea of animation and movement runs through pretty much every piece in the show. On one level we are allowed to enjoy the madcap, Ghostbusters energy of things, yet there is also a persuasively darker undercurrent, an intimation of things stifled and suppressed. Cotter goes with the playfulness, but she doesn't let us forget the more ominous side of it all.
Trudie Mooney's still-life paintings at the Solomon Gallery are terrifically accomplished. They depict tightly grouped arrangements of jugs and comparable containers viewed frontally as though arrayed along quite a narrow shelf. The format is almost relentlessly uniform. Nothing wrong with that, you could say - look at Morandi, after all. But it becomes a problem in a show that is so densely packed that individual pieces hardly have room to breathe. Because each picture is so closely similar to its neighbours, there is an inexorable, repetitive quality to the whole thing.
There is also the question of the undoubted similarity of Mooney's work to Martin Mooney's well regimented still lifes. His palette is substantially different, and somewhat wider, but the resemblance is still strong. It must be said though, that Trudie Mooney is technically proficient and, just as importantly, she does make a case for herself: she certainly has her own voice in her work.
Her predominantly earth-hued palette engenders a subdued, sombre atmosphere, and there are several outstanding pieces. Perhaps, in a sense, this is something of a graduation show for her. Her abilities are impressive, though there is a sense that the paintings are finished to within an inch of their lives. Now that she knows she can do it, and she knows we know, she may relax a little.
The current group show at Kevin Kavanagh works exceptionally well as an overall installation and features fine contributions from all six participating artists, Tadhg McSweeney and Cora Cummins being particularly notable. McSweeney's constructed sculptures, all located on simple, custom-made tables or plinths, are the products of a very particular, nuanced sensibility.
They derive from a residency at the Red Stable Studios and much of the material that constitutes them was acquired during walks in St Anne's Park: "twigs, wrappers and other discarded items". Acutely observant, McSweeney has a poet's ability to spot the metaphorical potential inherent in ordinary, overlooked things. Ingeniously shaping, combining and arranging forms, he creates extraordinary miniaturised worlds.
In a way the same applied to Cummins, whose interlinked small-scale paintings and prints are "meditations on . . . heterotopias - sites and situations whose borders and rules are self-defined and self-governed." The definition is loosely, and very fruitfully, applied.
Subjects include roundabouts, parks, ships, islands, bandstands - you get the idea. Each subject and motif is viewed in contemplative isolation, in a nicely understated, delicate way, and all are beautifully presented within the confines of a circular outline, as though spotlighted.
There's a lot more to see as well, in Sarah Durcan's exceptional paintings, a strongly characterised drawing by Geraldine O'Neill, Alison Pilkington's explorations of the painting process and Nevan Lahart's informal, provocative installations - though it would be difficult to trump his explanatory note: "For years he was reluctant to work whilst under the influence of alcohol; that all changed a few months ago in Hamburg when there was a free studio/exhibition space and a readily available supply of cheap drink."
