Platform Arts
Becoming Imperceptible by Molly O’Dwyer is on at the Platform Arts Gallery and. Active Art Studios at 1 Queen Street Belfast Studio 4 to 23 July 2014
Openings Mondays to Saturdays by ringing the bell at the front door.
Art is in Places we know
PLATFORM
TOP FLOOR
Once you touch the art, not physically of course but allow it to communicate to you, it begins saying new things. It often says them in the same manner as the last encounter. That is that nothing, absolutely anything never remains static. Our bodies adjust to time by becoming less elastic and unused joints matriculate everyday commands sent from the internal messenger who takes occasion rests and joins in the requested task as and when it sees fit. That could be as late as the following morning but as ever it acts after something else has happened. This is an abstract I took out if Molly O ‘Dwyers work which is a sense of what she calls as the shows title, Becoming Imperceptible. The work is a glorious combination of daily, day night observances chiefly over Dublins skyline with a domineering Sam the ham Stephensons megalithic tomb for the banker on Dame Street simultaneously pointing skyward and like an arrow stabbing into the central crust of hubris Ireland.
The main projector screen at the end wall of this long space shows a 14? Min loop film using a HD camera which has splendid depth of field as well as handling the detail passing through as a moving canvas. This is further minutiae of material blown up in scale to view intimacy the so called imperceptible we take for granted from whatever source. This is the wood on floors, frame working in timber and concrete and fragmented tarnished, soot perhaps, picking out the now imagined cosmos scape of surfaces ragged and full of randomised solidification.
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Stillness never moved so slowly is another message taken. Dogma and design expressed by material content again Becoming, Becoming. Never static. Especially the black shimmering light show within the city nighttime of on/off technology perhaps inferring life some automated. Molly O’Dwyer creates the juxtaposed fraternity to the city by placing minutiae in the space. Scenes of allegorical domesticity, of fabric material found in habitats. A pair of hollowed out blocks sit on the floor like mini lounge chairs and sit facing each other. They contain from her renovated house fire cement hacked of now in respite with a cadence of charred excision and exorcism. The decay fire licked cement rough and sedum tart in is armchair now cool. Chilling in the space life gone up in smoke.
I rest my case temporarily, this is a beautifully conceived installation. MO’D and here I recall another, the late DO’S taken from his family life far too early. Dermot O’Sullivan who worked on many of the buildings under the Platformed sky of Dublin. Work on Vicar Street part of his pride and joy of Dublin. This is abstractly a collective installation perhaps as it sidetracks without leaving the city the engagement amongst humans. First the humans then the buildings she seems to resonate.
The work here is very successfully placing our sense of scale in this installation with an immersion in the barely tangible. The thin connects we make becoming fluid in the chemicals we use in or heads where they fit precepts. These same chemicals storing them as strange inconsequential images. In our heads no moving projected images instead the moon of the fluid arranged into recall of some of the images Mollly O’Dwyer has here splendid in their otherness. The firecement in context is particularly a unique fashioned piece.
The work here is very successfully placing our sense of scale in this installation with an immersion in the barely tangible. The thin connects we make becoming fluid in the chemicals we use in or heads where they fit precepts. These same chemicals storing them as strange inconsequential images. In our heads no moving projected images instead the moon of the fluid arranged into recall of some of the images Mollly O’Dwyer has here splendid in their otherness. The firecement in context is particularly a unique fashioned piece.
PLATFORM
FLOOR BELOW
Miasma. James Fennel
The artist is performing an act by tensioning cords, from his as he stands, to fixing points away from the wall at about his own height facing it.
This is a self encounter with his own ‘Psuedo Miasma’ flowing down the slopes of the natural fibre ropes onto his chin is replicating one of the core performance art experiences. That is ones which involve self endurance and the shift that occurs when the own body begins to reject and challenge the inner person to repel the action.
Being performance it follows the biblical philosophy of ignoring the tyranny of the final product and the immersion in running the race ignoring the source.
Watching, witnessing I notice in many past locations the act has been freakishly disturbing for many viewers.
The whole piece is both recoiling and encouraging.
SEQUEL
Added August
WOODEN SPRUNG
Having visited this exhibition few times the separations between the pieces becomes more distinct. In reading material the fence, a jagged boundary is seemingly representative of a barrier to a body represented by a block of wood.
A forced consideration given the artists interest in dance and still attraction in a balletic form, in this it is far removed from the barrier that is the invisible sheet at the proscenium arch, our safety curtain.
Molly O’Dwyer may have a love of ballet as I do having spent many nights at various world class performances while I was in London.
This is a constant in ballet, not that revelatory, with the exceptional modern Macmillan following the master Ashton and the overseer Dame Ninette de Valois, portrayers of the light on stage of dancers interpreting Petipa and Diaghilev and so many others, with the Fonteyn’s Nureyev’s Seymour’s stilling life in a second then rushing into choreographed thrilling dance.
CRITIQUE
A critic or more academic view was taken of the fence dance floor in a childlike quantum leap ‘it’s transformatory energy explodes’.….fence v dance floor. Quaint acceptance of the narrative sought of the piece. Quite a bonkers reaction based on narrative and a stage design incomplete. No aspect of rear?
FALSITY
On reading this it is beyond the mountainous terrain that viewer and significantly, reader of the script makes, – the incumbent piece to be extraordinarily representative beyond its installation.
The piece also missed two sides, what that configures is anybody’s guess with an open question arising. As a dance floor it is meaningless.
As a metaphor barely tangible. I like the awareness but not the execution of its illusion.
DANCE
Dance beats the artist hands down and you only have to look at backdrops, stage design of the early works of Fredrick Ashton to see how significant this plays in the very modern pieces he left us with.
In Ashton’s Monotones 1.2, Persephone, Symphonic Variations, these are clear elements of any dancers ability. Not an interpretation represented in wood.! Or a Pavlova.
OPACITY
To extend these elements the credibility is art trope and as I point out above is opaque nonsense and is this adulterated into a dance floor and defensible is accords mentomony to this work as the artist is simply making a statement however crudely it is executed. The critics and allegory given it in writing on it are bound for pseudes corner as much of the commentary which evades the conflicts going on putting such pieces together in one space. It is almost a biography exhibition, retrospective done in a tight frame of time and thought.
MEANING
The dance floor material enters the main film much shorter than I first thought due perhaps to the darkness and shadows light altering in the gallery as other videos play out. The dance floor is evident and it is the scale which creates the force of this video. It is very noticeably architecturally experimental (Stonehenge is the assembly of three stones some re lifted into place in the past two hundred years so that analogy one critic obtains is more blissful shortness) with the structure formative and scaled to this screen projection giving as mentioned earlier blown up to this scale to reveal the intimacy of the materials and their interaction conceiving the architectural space. The point is the construct enabling us at this scale, not mentioned I but it thought its essential worth giving us a vision of the erceptible. Is that not what the Becoming Imperceptible is in this core piece what it is about? The soot marks rather than lenses looking at you are the ground on which the structure occupies. Almost a room in space.
ART greater than NEW VOIDS
It takes some getting used to the artificiality of language used in many arts of the Art world and it remains the prerogative of the artist to lead.
PREQUEL
6.33 BRADBURY PLACE
THREE CARS IN SCRAP FOR SPACE ARE BROUGHT TO A HALT ON THE ROAD. HOPEFULLY ONLY MINOR INJURIES. LOOKS TO HAVE HAPPENED AT QUITE LOW SPEED. PLENTY OF PEOPLE AROUND. HASTEN ON.
6.40 DUBLIN ROAD
SEE RORY MCILROY SQUIRE HIS GIRLFRIEND INTO THE MOVIE HOUSE AND APPEAR TO BE THE ONLY ONE ON THE STREET TO NOTICE HIM
6.43 ADELAIDE STREET
CALL INTO BELOW THE RADAR WITH THE ABOVE WORLD EXCLUSIVE, NON PLUSSED INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS ON NEWS DESK CARRY ON DELVING INTO NI GOVERNANCE BY SOVEREIGNTY AND RIGHT WING BANKS TO WHOM WE ARE INTO FOR TRILLIONS, SIR BG NON PLUSSED ABOUT ROTHSCHILDS – MONEY CONTINUES TO BE PRINTED.
GLAD NO PAPARAZZI WILL SCOOP AND REMIND MYSELF HIS TOMORROW WILL BE BUSY AS HE, NOT FOR LEISURE HITS THE GREENS AT ROYAL CO. DDWN. NI JGB WISHES RORY A MAJOR TOURNAMENT WIN/WINS ASAP. GREAT IMBASSADOR.
GOLDEN THREAD GALLERY
Archive by Herita Kioski and Niina Vatanen.
There are two Finnish photographers in the front space. They have taken the nationally highly regarded social archive and created by interventions and light touch the strong figures and groups from a lost era. Each is from the period between 1940 and 1970 generally. They are a homage to a rigorous harsh environment lived in with insouciance finely tuned and work intensive management of their north war harded country. As a native both the artists and the photographer are warmly appreciative of their homeland and their home folk.
It is interesting in the first place these self creative artists; a small portion of their own sourced work is on show, have used this national figures work and put their own response on it by physically applying a variety of visual interventions simultaneously spanning the past onto the present contemporary. This is an examination of photographic communication, giving further context and without subverting disrespectfully the basis source work, they concern the viewer with the distant country and through the technique chosen where they are as a people as evolved. Is industrial, agrarian life at odds with technology? Has past technology also offered particular challenges to the generations refracted in these pictures?
Palimpsest. 12 artists
Into the large ground floor space the bifurcated spaces are approached right room first. A splendid photograph is itself an arresting image given it’s role to convey the parameters of art here. Uncredited, the hoses own work? Or the contribution of the organiser curatorial Mir Jami Schuppert whose name is almost artisan and eclectic! The bifurcated Part One brings us again into contact with the terrific irreapealable forms of work Ursula Burke bring us her soul concerns and acute observations in superb little pieces like three dimensional cameos encountering occasional contact with ink. Go see these works and cherish the particular groove taken.
The large room has one column of tiered refractory type glass. No decoration it seems. You imagine how it would perform under a shower and of its fragility. Being indoors and without any outside to trouble it we can see it would if it behaved turn into a field bath for birds. This is offering a few more thoughts and sound could make it reverberate and although it reminds you of bells perhaps it is only a ‘bell’ in segments of the tower. Maybe it should have been kept back for the diversity of the RUA show invite where it could have been staged more formidably. As with pieces like this, being surrounded by work which is not itself short of presence it rather looses out. It is a familiar problem when art in this city is given so little space as outlet for new challenging art in as this is a refined sculptural shape requiring and deserving of long viewing.
On the opposite side of the mid wall of this bifurcated space a talk on modern art and it’s problems from public funding lack of engagement and a wide contingent of artwork requiring attention. This was delivered in semi darkness from a lit lectern and animated screen which the speaker talks to across the room. No eye contact possible. It is as though the text is speakers corner though I purposely paid it no attention preferring the animation of speaker (altering) and the viewer and passed through. A coil of Boat rope was carefully arranged in mid floor as a materiality of the artists bound rejections or attachments?
PS2 Papergirl Belfast
The guerrilla girls are at it again. As such the work has left the room the artist is not here. It has been taken down and handed out. Did you get something. Is it part of a new, old, newish collection? Will you tell someone about its origin, will you try doing a piece yourself? We need you to be artistic. It explains you better than a visage you present us with. While it is special it is not the you you are.Bring paper man he is folding in isolation.
One can only fold ANY size of sheet 7 times. Try it and join the pointless.
It may come in handy as therapy. It is short but sweet.
John Graham
7 July 2014
Belfast
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