Forms of Imagining – Garden (Project Press)

FORMS OF IMAGINING 26.04–22.06.13 PROJECT ARTS CENTRE

Niamh O’Malley Curated by Tessa Giblin

The Window and the Mirror Looking-Glass List of Works Biographies

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The Window and the Mirror

Projected onto black cloth, the dual channel film Garden, was shot from a static position. Within the unmoving frame, a large plain mirror is held, acting as a pivot and fulcrum for the filming apparatus, and itself the subject of the film. The mirror is held aloft and manoeuvred by two disembodied hands, which direct the tilting and panning, and thus the movement of the image that appears within it. An image within an image is revealed through a rhythmic edit, overlapping and oscillating between the two frames, gently building a portrait of the space we believe ourselves to be within; a walled, domestic garden of inner city Dublin. Niamh O’Malley’s garden, to be precise. As the image pans over tangled vines and wilful bushes, climbing up textured walls and reaching for horizon followed by sky, we can imagine the real space of the garden flanked by a towering wall; the embankment of a commuter train track.

Niamh O’Malley, Window, (detail), 2013, Glass, birch, plywood, oak, oil paint

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Niamh O’Malley’s recent film works have taken monumental sites as their subjects: from Britain’s biggest bridge, an island made symbolic through Catholic pilgrimage, to an immense working quarry. In Garden, O’Malley shifts her focus to a more personal and intimate subject, the garden that she and her family shape and reshape throughout the year.

“I was trying to figure out why I’d made all these works of monumental places and sites. I was thinking about intimacy, and also about how a subject is produced through scrutiny, or examination. Working in the garden while scrabbling with these questions, I realised that the garden was a perfect site of production, intention and the shaping of a space.”

The mirror is a simple device but also serves as a window into the real. It tells us, if only momentarily, that we are looking through a wall and into another world. But sooner or later we’re likely to move into the field of reflection, disrupt the illusion and realise that we’re simply seeing our own surroundings reflected back to us. There is no outside, there’s no real, there is simply an image loop. Space, which had seemed extended through the protective plane of the window, is suddenly more confined, and the world a fraction closer. The exhibition also includes a large painting on glass, which calls us to consider the illusion of the mirror in relation to the evolution of painting, and to the effort that figurative and landscape painting make to persuade us of a realism in their view. It is a subjective realism, but one that nonetheless relates to a lived experience. With the development of abstraction, and eventually the resistance of the idea of a physical, embodied subject within the frame at all, painting has been able to deny the illusion of the window, just as our reflected image in the mirror does.

Through Niamh O’Malley’s film, we are confronted with a different sort of image, a mirror that in some ways appears to be a window to the real, and in others to be a mirror-object. Our certainty of space becomes muddled, conflicted and stimulated. Contemporary painting is also enabled by both sides of this image-making coin, slipping between the representational and the abstract, with both approaches and discourses intrinsically embedded into its history, creating an inescapable context for the medium itself and a dynamic field for image making.

Against this backdrop of illusion, Niamh O’Malley uses the mirror device to construct a gaze that concentrates on a question of selection – on what does our attention settle, and with what has our attention been focused? These are questions of interest to many who consider how attention is captured (and thus how to better capture it), how attention is

framed (and thus how to more effectively control it), and how perception is formed (and therefore how to more thoroughly understand ourselves).

The idea that individuals assert creative influence, and therefore some responsibility, over the way they perceive, is what phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls ‘creative receptivity’. When having a visual experience, the perceived view may alter in our mind; the result not of any re-arrangement of landscape or objects, but of the way in which our perception is encountering and absorbing it. In this way, the perceiving subject and the object perceived are understood to be inherently linked.

Merleau-Ponty reminds us of this through a commonplace activity happening all over the world all the time – the parking of a car using rearview mirrors. It is a wonder that during this relatively complex manoeuvre, there aren’t more frequent bumps and errors in judgement. Merleau-Ponty describes the activity not so much as the result of a series of terrifically clever and accurate equations and judgements resulting in the correct degree of wheel turning and speed of acceleration, but more in the kind of embodied intelligence which exists in an expanded sensory field. In this case the car itself, with its rear view mirrors as its whiskers, is the expanded sensory field – the driver is the car – and the car is manoeuvred into place using this embodied intelligence.

What is so striking in Niamh O’Malley’s film, is that although the person clutching the mirror operates it as an extension of their own sensory field (and against the tension of the physical difficulty of holding it steady for long stretches of time), the perceiver, through the subjective gaze of the camera, has somehow disappeared. While understanding that the body holding the frame is the orchestrator of our attention, we also realise that our own position in the frame has been tampered with, tricking us into perceiving with a body that now seems to not be there at all.

Garden is an analogue allegory for a digital age, orchestrated without special effects or trickery, and yet produced entirely with digital materials.

This coy relationship with illusion is further complicated by O’Malley’s continuous use of black cloth as the surface onto which her films are projected. As she says, the black surface absorbs light so effectively that the image sinks into the surface, making it curiously and emphatically flat, belying the spectacle of its illusory promise.

These questions around framing of attention, explorations of selection and embodied intelligence are pinpointed by her frame-withina-frame film, and then expanded again in the second artwork in the exhibition. The painting on glass is framed and sandwiched between seating platforms, to be viewed from both sides. If the film turns our attention

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to the lens created by the moving mirror, the transparent surface she has been painting onto in the second artwork does quite the opposite, opening limitless variations and completion points, both for the spectator and for the painter herself. In a process that has to unfold with something of a domino effect, O’Malley treats both sides of the glass surface with marks (sometimes figurative, mostly abstract), creating no definitive viewpoint and a non-linear build-up of shape, texture and form. While adhering to a prefigured concept of the image she wanted to make, the process has also been stimulated by chance occurrences, one mark making necessary another – the way things go.

And just as we are stimulated by the complexity of the mirror’s effect on our understanding of real and illusory space, we are also delighted by the muddled knowledge implied in abstract painting. We know abstract painting to contain form, or at least we will it to contain form, even if only the faintest residue, perhaps of tone, colour, shape or texture. This allows us to convincingly grasp the process of abstraction; the gradual complication (and reduction) of something already experienced in our lives, to something that is free from restraint of representation, and open to a prism of reflections.

Tessa Giblin, Curator of Visual Arts, Project Arts Centre

Looking-Glass

In his classic study of English Romanticism, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), M. H. Abrams contrasts the pre-Romantic conception of art as primarily devoted to mimesis with that which displaced it, the idea of art as illumination.1 Various works produced by Niamh O’Malley over the past decade, when considered together, call to mind this dichotomy between divergent aspirations for art – to reflect back to the viewer a world that is already familiar, or to cast light on one previously obscured – if only to reassert the limitations of both. Yet to suggest that she may be drawn to time-honoured debates should not blind us to the fact that she has re-engaged with them by means that have at times been highly original.

The first extensive body of work by O’Malley to attract significant critical attention, which she embarked upon in 2003, is a case in point.2 This was a series of what she refers to as ‘video-paintings’, a term that signalled early-on a willingness to confound inherited categories and to dispense with any fidelity to the specificity of a given medium. Hyphenated terms such as ‘videopainting’ more often than not are intended to suggest a marriage of concerns and/or characteristics deemed somehow inherent to disparate mediums.

O’Malley’s coinage, however, denotes a literal hybrid. In these works, an image derived from video footage shot by the artist, but belonging more properly to a traditional genre of painting – landscape, streetscape, interior – is painted onto a canvas support, leaving certain details and sections of the picture blank. The looped original footage is then projected onto the partially painted canvas. The result is an uncannily shimmering ‘doubled’ picture in saturated colours, which becomes especially disconcerting, even ghostly, when the superimposed moving imagery is at variance with the 6/7

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Niamh O’Malley, Garden, 2013, installation view. Dual channel HD video installation, silent

static image beneath. At the end of the video loop the projected image suddenly dissolves, briefly but exquisitely exposing the nature of the artifice, before resuming and, by doing so, reanimating, without actually restoring, the work’s formative illusion.

Much that remains characteristic of O’Malley’s work, which has nevertheless evolved and diversified considerably in the intervening years, is already in evidence here. This includes her unique blend of the sensual with the schematic, as well as a kind of cat-and-mouse play between revelation and occlusion or, put more dramatically, between seduction and disenchantment. If part of what is at stake here is the desire to hold in productive tension the perennial imperatives of transcendence and criticality, O’Malley seems more than usually attracted to the mediation of such conventional oppositions. That disenchantment itself might, for example, harbour its own form of seductiveness, is suggested by a revealing

comment in which she professes her fondness for “stained glass [as] seen from the outside, all murky and flattened”.3 This observation also usefully draws attention to the centrality to her work of glass as a favoured material, in its multiple forms and functions i.e. as opaque, transparent or reflective; as something to be looked at, looked through, or both simultaneously, in effect. Regarding stained glass in particular, she has the following to add to the remark already quoted: I read somewhere about how stained glass, as well as provoking interiority, is difficult to read, as our eyes are meant to make sense of light falling on objects rather than through them. So our ability to read the image is automatically secondary, [as] our eyes are preoccupied with the brightest spot.

An extreme demonstration of this preoccupation with bright spots, as well as an intriguing anticipation of this latest exhibition Garden at Project Arts Centre, is provided by the artwork Torch (2007). This is a short, looped video, recorded at night, in which a meandering traversal of an urban garden is traced by torchlight, briefly illuminating disparate details of its flora.

The work is projected onto a screen of stretched canvas painted black in a blacked-out room such that the viewer is enveloped in almost total darkness, save for the shifting cone of projected light, which effectively mimics the original movements of the torch. Yet O’Malley seems no less interested in dark spots – or indeed blind spots – than in bright ones, as we can see from a pendant work, Scotoma, made the following year in 2008. This is a five-minute video loop projected onto a rectangular panel of MDF on which a large, slightly off-centre stain has been painted in black oil paint, which corresponds to an obscured area of the projected imagery, produced by placing a black piece of paper in front of the camera lens while filming. In this instance, a similarly wayward camera surveys the cluttered interior of an antique shop as well as the open vistas of a tree-filled public park. That the lingering examination of a small landscape painting supplies a notional portal between these alternating, visually compromised indoor and outdoor scenes suggests that, almost a century after Marcel Duchamp’s renunciation of ‘retinal art’, painting per se remains a privileged site in O’Malley’s eyes, a locus classicus for the exploration of what it might mean to look attentively and really see.

Her two-part exhibition at Project Arts Centre is, in many ways, a culmination of the concerns just limned. If Torch may be taken to epitomise one aspect of Abrams’s mirror/ lamp pairing, the two-channel film installation Garden (2013) epitomises the other, featuring as it does

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a pair of disembodied hands slowly panning and tilting a mirror, which occupies most of the frame.4 The moving mirror reflects shifting views of the garden in which the largely invisible mirror-bearer is standing against a wall of lush vegetation, yet without once catching sight of the entirely invisible camera-operator. This garden is evidently quite narrow as the level of detail in the mirrored image of the creeper-clad wall behind the camera is not inconsistent with that of the wall in front of it. The visual effect is to constrict the perceived depth of field to such a degree that the space occupied by the wielders of mirror and camera alike, and by implication the viewer herself, seems in danger of vanishing altogether.

In spite of its lapidary quality and beguiling pictorialism, Garden thus calls to mind one notable aspect of early video art, from which it differs in most other respects. Rosalind Krauss argued many years ago that a crucial characteristic of early video is a collapsing of time and an attenuation of space, which she subsumed under the rubric of ‘autoreflection’ or ‘mirror reflection’, though she did not intend the latter term to refer literally to the deployment and/ or representation of mirrored surfaces. Rather she likened the ‘vanquishing of separateness’ she discerned in certain works by Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Lynda Benglis to “facing mirrors on opposite walls [that] squeeze out the real space between them”.5 Krauss was at pains to distinguish the auto-reflection characteristic of early video, its constitutive ‘narcissism’, which she found problematic, from the self-reflexiveness of modernist painting, which she found commendable.

Of course the definitive account of this self-reflexiveness is that provided by Krauss’s early mentor Clement Greenberg, who described the evolution of modernist painting in terms of progressive stages of refinement – which is to say the gradual filtering out of all those properties painting had accrued through the ages, that were not inherent to it as a medium. This may seem to take us some distance from the work of Niamh O’Malley, which plays hard and fast with medium-specificity. Even so, the question of filtering, and the issue of the filter, in both mechanical and metaphoric terms, merits further examination.

A filter is a device designed to remove unwanted material. Its purpose is refinement, purification, and the general enhancement of a given experience. Most filters function discretely, drawing little attention to themselves or their mediating properties. This is not, however, always the case. Many photographers and film-makers, for instance, use colour filters in order to produce specific – generally defamiliarising, sometimes spectacular – optical effects. A pertinent example here might be James Welling’s 2006–09 photographs and film of Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House.

While O’Malley is sparing in her use of such effects – the colour film Quarry

Niamh O’Malley, Garden, 2013, installation view. Project Arts Centre

(2011) is exceptional in this regard (as well as superficially comparable to the Welling works just cited) – the idea of a filter as a mechanism with the potential to distort as well as to enhance is suggestive, all the same. First, with regard to enhancement and refinement, a generalised conception of ‘filtering’ accounts for certain key decisions made in the production of O’Malley’s video works. She notes, for example, that her decision to film Garden, in particular, in black-and-white ensured that the viewer is not unduly distracted by horticultural specifics, by the appreciation of individual plants and flowers, not to mention any symbolic associations this might entail (e.g. the intimations of romance or longevity prompted by a profusion of lavender wisteria). Silence is another mechanism deployed in her films, none of which have a soundtrack, in order to eliminate undue interference with the act of concentrated looking on the viewer’s part.

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With regard to distortion, on the other hand, aside from the use of tinted and unevenly surfaced glass filters in Quarry, the most consistent use in O’Malley’s films of what might, at a stretch, be called a ‘filter’ is less a matter of distortion than an actual disruption of the flow of images. This is effected by the intermittent passing or placing of an opaque surface in front of the camera lens causing the screen to go black for a while. It is tempting to relate this alternating revelation and occlusion of the image – which has been such a notably recurring trope in O’Malley’s work from the outset, as we have seen – to Freud’s famous analysis in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of his infant grandson’s game of ‘Fort/Da’, which involved repeatedly discarding his toys and then retrieving them, as the compulsive repetition of a distressing experience, namely the disappearance of the mother. Freud interprets this game in terms of “the child’s great cultural achievement”, which is “the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction” in allowing his mother “to go away without protesting.”6 This particular invocation of Freud would be difficult to justify were it not for the peekaboo character of so many of O’Malley’s works. It also, however, begs the question as to who – or indeed what – might constitute the dearly departed mother, i.e. the reluctantly outgrown source of previous pleasure, in O’Malley’s case. Might it simply be the art-historical matrix from which her work has sprung? More specifically, if somewhat surprisingly, might it be the medium of painting to which the work so frequently and so pointedly alludes? On the face of it, this seems improbable, given the more obvious claims on O’Malley’s attention of the various mediums with which – unlike painting per se – she actually continues to work, i.e. video, sculpture, drawing. Even photography initially seems like a more suitable candidate, in spite of her limited recourse to the medium, given that one quality that binds Garden to previous film installations such as Bridge (2009), Island (2011) and Quarry is their shared indebtedness to the pictorial values of high modernist black-and-white photography, most markedly in the solicitation of a protracted scrutiny of the tones and textures of stone, wood, wave and leaf. That said, according to a common account of modernist photography, its evolution is in fact inextricable from that of modernist painting, in that it increasingly devoted itself to the precise transcription of observable reality, which abstract painting was in the process of abandoning.

So it may well be that, ultimately, the history of painting – including the repeated reports of its imminent or actual demise over the course of her own lifetime – has had a more profound and generative significance for O’Malley than that of any other medium. Stray pieces of evidence for such an unlikely assertion abound in her work, from the early ‘video-

paintings’, through to the tâchisme aveugle of Scotoma (2008) to the studiedly anachronistic scenario of the academic life-drawing class in Model (2011) and it would not be difficult to find in other key works such as Flag (2008), and Bridge formal echoes of certain canonical modernist paintings. Further support for this admittedly tendentious reading of O’Malley’s oeuvre may be provided by the second element in the Project Arts Centre exhibition, which perfectly complements Garden. Set into a wooden seating platform is a large pane of glass, both sides of which bear painted marks here and there, ranging from fugitive figuration to unremitting abstraction. It might be argued, in conclusion, that this work deftly telescopes an entire history of Western painting, from Renaissance theorist Battista Alberti’s pioneering account of the medium as a ‘window on the world’, through the rich and varied history of landscape painting, through early Modernism’s great challenge to painting in the form of Duchamp’s The Large Glass, down to the self-consciously desultory mark-making of endgame abstraction in the face of recurring portents of the death of the medium.

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith

1 M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, W.W. Norton & Co, New York, 1953.

2 An example of such a work by the artist is The dene ‘vignette’, 2014 3 All quotations from the artist, unless otherwise indicated, are from a conversation with the writer on July 22, 2013, as well as some subsequent email correspondence.

4 Garden is the first two-channel work produced by O’Malley.

5 Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, first published as ‘Video and Narcissism, October, no. 1 (Spring 1976) and reprinted in Krauss, Perpetual Inventory, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts – London, 2010, pp. 3–18.

6 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVIII, The Hogarth Press, London, p.15.

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Niamh O’Malley, Garden, 2013, Dual channel HD video installation, silent (video still)

List of Works Niamh O’Malley 1. Garden, 2013 Dual channel HD video synched, 7'7" loop, silent, 16:9 Black polycotton, oak frames 300 × 160 × 5 cm, 260 × 160 × 5 cm 2. Window, 2013

Glass, oak frame, birch plywood, oil paint

240 × 210 × 120 cm

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Niamh O’Malley, Window, 2013, Glass, birch, plywood, oak, oil paint

Biography Niamh O’Malley lives and works in Dublin.

She uses video, drawing, painting and sculpture to examine the ways in which we try to access the world through images.

Her works often act as filters and invite us to enter the spaces between objects and our ideas of them. O’Malley has made numerous solo exhibitions in recent years: Bluecoat Liverpool, 2015/16; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2014/15; The Mayo Collaborative, five venue solo exhibition, Ireland, 2013; Garden, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 2013; Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norway, 2012; Model, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, 2011; Island, Centre Culturel Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 2010; Frame, Glass, Black, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 2010; Echo, Gaain Gallery, Seoul, 2010; No Distance, Void, Derry, 2009. Selected group exhibitions include: EVA International Biennale of Visual Art, Limerick, 2012; TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, 2012; Kilkenny Arts Festival, 2012; All Humans Do, White Box, New York, 2012; The Model, Sligo, 2012; Twenty, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2011; The Dissolution of Time and Space, Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, 2011; and The Ha-Ha Crystal, Maria Stenfors, London, 2011.

Monographs and publications include: Niamh O’Malley, foreword by John Hutchinson and essay by Rebecca O’Dwyer, 2015; Niamh O’Malley, essays by Luke Gibbons, Matt Packer, Patrick Murphy, published Linenhall Arts Centre, Co. Mayo,

2013; Viewfinder, essay by Chris FiteWassilak, published by Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 2011; Torch, essay by Brian Dillon, design by Robin Watkins, published by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, 2008; Window, essay by Maeve Connolly, published by Palazzo delle Papesse Centro d’Arte Contemporanea, Siena, 2006. Residency awards include: Funen Art Academy, Denmark, 2014; Helsinki International Artist Programme, Helsinki, 2008; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2008; Fire Station Artists Studios, Dublin, 2005–8; International Studio Programme Residency, PS1, MoMa, New York, 2003–4; and the Northern Irish Fellowship at The British School at Rome, 2000. Her work is included in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery, Arts Council of Ireland, and Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Turin. O’Malley received a PhD in practice-led research from University of Ulster, Belfast in 2003. www.niamhomalley.com Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith is a critic and occasional curator who teaches in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore at University College Dublin. He has published widely on contemporary art, is a contributor to Afterall, Artforum, Frieze and Parkett, and was a juror for the 2005 Turner Prize.

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Garden Niamh O’Malley Published as an edition of Forms of Imagining, a series published

by Project Press based on the exhibitions programme of Project Arts Centre.

Dublin, March 2016 ISBN 978-1-872493-48-0 Editor: Tessa Giblin © The Artist, Writer and Project Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission of the publishers.

Text: Tessa Giblin, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith Designed in Ireland by WorkGroup Sub-Editor: Kate Heffernan Series Editor: Emer Lynch Garden Niamh O’Malley 26 April – 22 June 2013 Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Project Press Project Arts Centre 39 East Essex Street Temple Bar Dublin 2 Ireland + 353 (0)1 881 9613 gallery@projectartscentre.ie www.projectartscentre.ie A limited edition set of prints, produced by Niamh O’Malley for Project, are available for purchase at projectartscentre.ie Project Arts Centre is supported

by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon and Dublin City Council. With warm thanks to Niamh O’Malley, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Rachael Gilbourne and Black Church Print Studio.

The artist would like to extend special thanks to Toby Dennett, Kevin Hughes, Sven Anderson, Flan Hedderman, Michael Higgins, Ciara McKeon and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin.

Curator: Tessa Giblin Assistant Curator (2013): Ciara McKeon Production Manager: Joseph Collins General Manager (2013): Niamh O’ Donnell Artistic Director: Cian O’Brien

Black Church print studio