REVIEW: FISH, FLESH AND FOWL, Dermot Seymour, Golden Thread Gallery

Botulism over Mullaghcreevy, 1985, Oil on Linen

In spite of the representational nature of his paintings, Dermot Seymour’s body of work is hard to pin down. In fact, it cannot even be described as “representational” with any amount of certainty: from a distance, his montaged oil paintings do appear more or less cohesive, a window into a bizarre and uncanny version of the world. Step closer, however, and you can see the crisp outer edges are combine with an odd soft focus. Backgrounds layer on foregrounds as the light sources mix.

This exposed unreality is not through a lack of proficiency. Had Seymour wanted to create cohesive and closed off realities, he could certainly have done so: in several works, there are contrasting details that reveal the extent of his competence. Instead, this incoherency makes light of the falseness in the worlds he creates. These are not meant to be replacement photographs: Seymour means for us to see the fictitiousness of the setting, familiar yet other. Through the apparent collaged nature of his subjects, they become single entities placed together in the frame and not part of any explicit created narrative. The interaction between them is unclear, for their awareness of one another is perpetually in question.

There is little or no action in Seymour’s “collaged” work, just implications. In Botulism over Mullaghcreevy (1985), a man lies in the centre of a dirt road. There is a woman’s lying leg, an inert seagull, and a tethered goat. A perfectly rendered, almost static helicopter flies off in the distance. It can be assumed that the title references the Mullaghcreevy park massacre, and yet the figures in the road are not explicitly dead. The strange, arbitrary nature of the goat throws even the importance of these humans into question – Are they relevant? Are they real?

As with all artists, there is fluidity to the growth of Seymour’s working concerns. Based in Northern Ireland’s politics, then also the politics of man and nature, so much of the ambiguity of these works lies in the assumptions the viewer must make. With animals, much of their action is implied in what we know of their instinct and nature. Suppositions are made about hierarchies in this non-narrative, about what power shall or could be exerted in a vague relationship.

Perhaps Seymour has used animals in this context as they are without awareness, and at the mercy of their circumstances – the land and sky are as pocked as humans like, if present in any recognisable form. These creatures have a neutrality that human subjects lack. When figures do appear in these works, often they seem to lack any distinct identity, through generic features, cropping from the frame or, indeed, headlessness.

There’s an unsettling comical nature to these subtle visual metaphors, and how they relate to the ambiguous and sometimes absurd titles. It’s a dark humour provides some sort of relief to the weight of its subject, allowing the more subtle questions about inner relationships to slip through. In this questioned contact, there are very human dynamics expressed, and the intricacies of the speculation of interaction are explored.

These visual interplays were painted from the 70s until the 90s, and make up the bulk of this exhibition. They are Seymour’s strongest works: in spite of their occasional paradigmatic flags and political symbols, in 2012 they express something other than old despair.

There are, however, a few unfortunate exceptions. The dead-eyed piper in McClug (1979) and faceless Orangeman surveying a town, helicopter and grey sky in The Last Ditch (1981) are reductive and too overt, limited to it’s own immediate heavy-handed image. These paintings harbours the literality that so much Northern Irish political work falls down on; and whilst it can be appreciated that such work was not created with longevity in mind, when viewed today these works have little to contribute.

Some of Seymour’s most recent work is less explicit. Visually he takes a step toward his subject, creating a number of portraits of animals and political figures. These singular depictions remove relationships to other entities, making more of their other relational aspects. The political titles remain: Anglo Norman (2010) is a toad, whilst Hiberno God (2009) is a monkey. The relationship between title and piece has more focus, although the work hasn’t really benefited from the paring down of its ambiguity.

In Poppey Eyed (2009) and Rabbit Eyed (2007) we see Seymour’s thought and painting process come together more cohesively. There is a strange slight misalignment to the eyes, a lack of definition. These figures have no context: we are the only things to which they relate. We cannot make firm eye contact with these media representations. Of us but not with us, there is a break in their humanity. As with the older montage paintings, there is a sense that something is not quite right.

There is a question of explicitness that hangs over Seymour’s body of work, of crossing the line of ambiguity and back again. Combined with non-sequential hanging, it gives this exhibition a slightly fractured feel. Viewed as a whole, however, these conceptually simpler works support Seymour’s more nuanced paintings. Seymour’s retrospective proves that his work can be more than a mere relic of The Troubles: as an artistic growth crossed with a political one, it can speak as much about the nature of relationships as a specific past.

REVIEW: TEARS IN RAIN/DHEORA SAN FHEARAINN, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast

Some Wounds Healing; Some Birds Singing, by Conrad Atkinson

Belfast is, to put it lightly, no stranger to The Troubles Exhibition. Their ubiquity around these parts is an oft-debated matter, seen as either an indicator or inhibitor of Northern Ireland’s “progress”.

Whatever your opinion on their political cause and effect, it’s true that some of these exhibitions are so similar that they merge into one another. The problem seems to stem from the fact that, despite their subject’s predominance, there’s still often a considerable amount of hesitancy in the content of group exhibitions. More surveying than directive in their stance, the unspoken quotas of neutrality have made for many a cautious and repetitive show.

Golden Thread Gallery’s Tears in Rain/Dheora san Fhearhainn sidesteps this pitfall: as part of the collective histories series, this is Mairtin O Muilleoir’s curatorial expression of the past. It doesn’t claim to be reflective of now, and it isn’t cautiously diplomatic. It’s a more personal and authentic approach to curation that leaves the mind free to consider some more politics behind political art.

Real life is a sobering thing, and in the face of conflict – whether present or residual – the artifice of art can sometimes be to its own detriment. It can be difficult for work depicting these complex and potent events not to seem illustrative or prescriptive. In being illusionistic, figurative painting is particularly susceptible to this problem: it can often come to a point in which its not-quite-real presentation feels somewhat contrived.

It’s a wall that Robert Ballagh’s paintings in this exhibition unfortunately come up against. Portrait of Pat Finucane’s airbrushed blood and geometrically cut wood, depicting the window through which he was shot, are just too perfectly rendered. Its mural-like stylisation is familiar, but in this instance it seems a little cold and calculated. Same, too, with Ballagh’s portrait of Alex Maskey MLA, which like most government commissioned paintings feels socialist realism in its resoluteness. It’s all very steady and considered, like the work of a sign maker.

On the other end of the painting spectrum is Silver Liberties: A Souvenir of a Wonderful Year by Conrad Atkinson. It is composed of four canvases stained to a tricolour flag, plus a black panel, graffiti-ed and collaged with text and images responding to the British presence in Northern Ireland and the death of the hunger strikers. Atkinson does little with the material, creating a montage of response and repetition, isolating and condensing. This is less of a painting and more of a forum for information, combining and contrasting various modes of representation.

Perhaps it’s churlish to comment on the longevity of art in a historical exhibition, but for all the potency of Sliver Liberties’ material, it’s strangely matter-of-fact to look at in 2011. It was originally a call for attention in the face of the media gaiety surrounding the Queen’s silver jubilee. Today, its power has been diluted by such information’s ubiquity since its original banning all those years ago.

I feel the art with the most remaining energy in this exhibition is more visually metaphoric. The salted prison door chamber of Rita Duffy’s Veil is visceral, carrying so many connotations (of tears, of purification, of salted wounds) that the piece resonates. Unambiguous the teardrops may be, but the fragility of the glass develops the piece a stage further. Veil’s materiality speaks clearly and supports its concept. Similarly, Aisling O’Beirn’s animation Lion na Dearnai­­­­ (“fill the gaps”) uses the pictorial nature of words and repetition, animating and layering language in time and space, to create an overload of continuously abstracting information. Even the unexplained box of stolen nest eggs carries a lot of metaphoric weight when viewed in the context of this exhibition. It’s an effective touch of subtlety in the face of so much explicitness.

Some Wounds Healing; Some Birds Singing features a wallpaper design based on the “chuckle brothers” image. It’s another, more current work by Atkinson, and uses repetitive media imagery much more eloquently. It’s developed through its contrast with a symbolic yet poignant stuffed blackbird – a lively, static, boxed dead animal, perhaps redolent of the eggs. Opposite, the children of Bunscoil Mhic Reachtain display their drawings and playful superhero photographs. In between are coffee tables, sofas, and the previous editions of Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, displaying alternative curatorial perspectives of our past. In a way, it’s a strange little taste of home.

REVIEW: CONTRABAND by Taryn Simon, Belfast Exposed

It’s fortunate that, despite dreaming of having all the time, money and space in the world to make work, artists as a rule will thrive on their restrictions. Having set parameters allows you to think and to feel, to push those proverbial boundaries and to twist things around. With boundless possibility comes boundless floundering.

Of course this rule on rules has its own limits. And sometimes, an artwork’s most debilitating parameters are those that are self-inflicted. Exhibit A, the research-based artwork.

No matter how engaging the initial concept, sometimes the self-imposed regulations of conceptual documentary can lead to its own downfall. In a heavily process-based project, the work is often more about the act of recording than the records themselves. As a result, the visual content is arbitrary and even irrelevant, for the project’s completion renders it “successful” no matter what. This often doesn’t make for dynamic work, and in this way, conceptual documentary will always carry the risk of being too safe.

This week I went to see the work of Taryn Simon at the Belfast Exposed Gallery, which runs until December 30th. Contraband is the result of five sleepless days in JFK airport, in which the photographer recorded items that had been seized or detained by flight passengers or airmail.

On paper it’s the perfect example of a project that can fall foul of the aforementioned image irrelevance, and indeed, it carries many of its signifiers: a preconceived idea, a white backdrop, a fixed focal length, groupings by subject.

In Contraband Simon has used photography not just as a recording device, but as a leveller of objects. These images mix the comical (for example, women-shaped blister packs of diet pills) with the mundane (grass), as well as the downright gristly (skinned guinea pigs). Yes, there are the expected firearms and narcotics, but the democracy of photography doesn’t elevate them above any of the other images. Despite the voyeuristic nature of this project, mixing the manifestations of lust, greed and hate with those more “innocent” objects gives everything a strangely non-judgemental platform, for all have been subjected to the same treatment.

Whilst this sort of documentary photography could have been placed in the bracket of photojournalism, Simon holds back almost as much information as she exposes. Apart from the small wall text listing the items at the end of the exhibition, the works remain undefined, and of unmarked origin and time. Arranged by type yet grouped together, this exhibition exposes and diffuses a mass undefined threat.

Clichéd as it may be, it is in this lack of information that your own preconceptions are exposed. In one photo it suddenly becomes clear that the white substance, bagged and duct taped, is actually cream. Conversely, “pure cleaner” reveals itself to be a date-rape drug in a chillingly apt label.

Amidst all of its surprise and intrigue, Contraband doesn’t simply ride on the coattails of its initial concept. Simon has pulled off the balancing of process and visual result with ease, as these images are thoughtful in their own right. They are quiet symbols of reality, and I’m left thinking long after I leave the gallery space. It’s not such a safe concept after all.