Exhibition Profiles

Philip Moss, ‘Unseen’, installation view, Regional Cultural Centre; photograph by Eugene McGinty, courtesy the artist and RCC.

Unseen

NICK MILLER INTERVIEWS PHILIP MOSS ABOUT HIS PAINTING PRACTICE AND RECENT EXHIBITION AT RCC.

Nick Miller: I’m starting with a simple question: what does the title of the recent show ‘UNSEEN’ mean for you? Philip Moss: I suppose it has meaning on a number of levels: firstly that I feel that people don’t really know my work and that I’ve remained hidden from the art world because of 30 years living and working in Donegal; and secondly that it refers to experiences, particularly childhood experiences, that I have never publicly addressed before, that are referenced in some of the works.

NM: You have described yourself definitively as a conceptual artist who paints, and that the idea that comes to you is the most vital moment of the creative process, envisioning a work in intensely awake periods of night-time thinking. PM: I think that used to be more of the case, and that like Francis Bacon described, an image would drop into your brain like a slide into a projector. These days however, the idea forms the seed of the painting rather than the finished image, otherwise the process of painting would become somewhat tedious, as I’d be leaving nothing to chance. I have always been a planner and tended to work in series. I can tell you now that the next two subjects that are fixating me are Kate Bush’s album, Aerial, and views from behind, of characters from literature. I already have my next show planned out.

NM: I’m trying to tease out some contradictions I find between you as a conceptual artist/painter but also as somebody who energises paint and material with some deeply visceral responses to the world – and that for me is definitely not an ‘idea’. PM: I think that there has always been an element of the political in my work and, in order for that to happen, there has to be an idea – so whether it’s an atrocity or injustice that I feel the need

to record or address, that is the beginning. But I find the actual physical nature of putting paint on canvas incredibly exciting and I can guarantee that if you see me in a gallery, I’m going to be close to the painted surface looking at the individual strokes an artist makes. In my case, I had to use DIY fillers in works like Oestrogen (2021) because I ran out of paint during Covid, an example of what I would describe as a lucky accident. So yeah, I mean what actually keeps me painting is the joyous process of applying any material to the canvas.

NM: Yes, even in Lullaby (2020), that is so conceptual in its use of the bed headboard, text and colour, it just opens the door for me; after that, it is the materiality and presence that transfixes. PM: The headboard wasn’t really brutal enough, compared to the one I actually remember from hospital; it was quite delicate, but I wanted to have something there that would not repel you – to kind of drag you in with beauty. I think I surprised myself seeing my own show, particularly how I was able to use colour and whatever material to do that – to draw you in, even if the idea or ‘subject’ might possibly be uncomfortable.

NM: I wonder how you understand the relationship between your very highly developed ‘realist’ painting skills and your stated lack of excitement in conventional painting. I guess you could probably have had a comfortable career as a more traditional painter? PM: Well, to drop back into realism is my default setting. Occasionally I use it, and invariably it’s for the wrong reasons. I have a modest collection of other people’s work and I can’t think of one painting that is realistic. I am much more drawn to artists like Philip Guston or Rose Wylie, who just look like they’re having fun in the studio. You have to ask, who are you painting for?

NM: So along with maybe being ‘unseen’, that brings me to your audience. In the Haiku piece, amongst other texts, you literally ask Cornelia Parker to be an audience. PM: Yes, I suppose that’s rather a frantic plea. I feel like someone who has missed the last train leaving town and is desperately reaching out. Cornelia Parker is a big hero of mine, as is Marcel Duchamp; they both enable one to make art out of anything. That gives you a tremendous freedom. In this exhibition I definitely felt that I was doing plenty of screaming but that’s important when you live in such a remote part. Luckily

some of my cries have been heard and that gives me enthusiasm to plod along. So even if the reality of the audience in Donegal and Ireland is small, for a moment at least, my imagination and ambition can place them in another context.

NM: Let’s go back to your relationship with other painters. You are pretty unique on this island for the time you spent in London during the eighties assisting Lucian Freud, while working for his agent James Kirkman, and meeting the likes of Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach in the process. I am guessing such early encounters with serious icons of painting implanted something in you. You have two paintings in the show that address those painters’ work, which could be pastiches, but to me despite the risks, you somehow pull them off and put the artists to bed with your own voice. I like that you take huge risks with subject matter and respond with a mixture of darkness and humour – it is somewhat unsettling. PM: Thanks Nick, that is very generous. Strangely, those paintings referencing Bacon and Freud were the least important to me in the show. I guess I just wanted to have fun and show off a little. I always wanted a Bacon painting of my own, so I just said, “fuck it, I’ll make one”. The Freud painting was less fun to do, but I felt that I needed to move the monkey off my back. Freud was my inspiration in art college and by bizarre coincidence or good karma, I ended up working for his dealer. I used David Dawson’s photo of Freud on his death bed. The piece is called Cremnitz White (2022), which was the name of the lead-based paint that he used without gloves, and I often wonder if it contributed to his demise. I suppose one of the things that I admired about Freud was his drive to paint right until the end of life, something I aspire to. The last thing I would say to anybody who happens to read this: you should always wear gloves when painting with oils!

Nick Miller is an artist who lives in Sligo.

@nickmiller_studio

Philip Moss is an artist based in West Donegal.

@philipmossart

‘Unseen’ ran at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny from 25 June to 3 September.

regionalculturalcentre.com

Philip Moss, ‘Unseen’, installation view, Regional Cultural Centre; photograph by Eugene McGinty, courtesy the artist and RCC.

Philip Moss, Boys from the border, 2022, oil on linen, 120 x 150 cm; photograph by Eugene McGinty, courtesy the artist and Regional Cultural Centre.

Philip Moss, Étant Donnés, 2019, oil on linen, 150 x 150 cm; photograph by Eugene McGinty, courtesy the artist and Regional Cultural Centre.

To Ashes

MAXIMILIAN LE CAIN REVIEWS EVGENIYA MARTIROSYAN’S RECENT EXHIBITION AT GOMA WATERFORD.

‘TO ASHES’, EVGENIYA Martirosyan’s solo exhibition at GOMA Waterford, has a ring of finality about it. Beyond the point of death, ashes. Decomposition by fire into dust. On entering the gallery, even before setting eyes on the first piece, the flicker of flames, reflected on the white walls, strikes an ominous note.

This leads into a moving image installation consisting of two large projections of close-up details of a bed burning in a field at night. The charred pieces of the bed are arranged on the gallery floor. The projections extend from the floor up, which means that the shadows of the bed fragments are cast across the lower section of the projected images and become part of them. The scale of this installation in proportion to the space creates a powerful effect. It is at once imposing and intimate, arranged in such a way that viewers are always within the installation and unable to distance themselves from it.

The second space is contrastingly minimal. Two video pieces play side by side on small wall-mounted monitors. These monochromatic loops show ghostly hands sifting through ash, and ash raining down from darkness, cascading over a pair of hands feebly closed against its falling. The exhibition is completed with a series of eight photographic prints of hands in ashes that are grouped together on an adjacent wall.

The thematic starkness of the work is what impresses first. Confronted with fire and ashes, there seems to be nowhere for the mind to go but into the most sombre contemplation of annihilation. Thoughts of personal mortality, of war, of a world pushed to the

brink of destruction, crowd forward from the dust. The sense of fragility that permeates Martirosyan’s work is immediate and haunting. Placing a bed at the centre of her installation is a particularly unsettling strategy. Steeped in dreams, sleep, sex, and sickness, this highly charged domestic object is the site of our most intimate communion with ourselves. Seeing an old bed eaten by flames is second only to seeing a lifeless body burn, in conveying a life devoured by flames. But the absence of a body allows us to project our own experiences and anxieties directly onto this universal object.

The images of hands in ash seem no less despairing. Ashes are the ground in which hands search and find nothing in their sifting. For viewers willing to stare down this bleakness, its finality can come to seem less definitive. Patterns of transformation and even renewal start to emerge. This might be more immediately apparent to viewers familiar with Martirosyan’s ongoing concerns with the transformation of familiar objects into sculptural forms, thus liberating them from their associated uses. Nevertheless, the existential stakes have never been this high in her work; it hasn’t previously confronted complete destruction so directly. Yet even in ashes, she suggests, destruction is never truly complete but part of an ongoing cycle of impermanence. There is nothing overtly spiritual, ceremonial or ritualistic in this process. Her focus remains unwaveringly on materiality. Yet this detached focus also avoids imposing an explicit point of view on the work. It is open enough to allow viewers to explore whatever personal resonances this highly charged imagery might evoke in them.

In one of the videos, hands are seen clawing through the ash. But they also emerge from it and are again absorbed by it. They might find nothing remaining to grasp in the ash, but they are not separate from it either. Even if we are unable to fully understand the purpose of the ash, it is endowed with a mysterious, ghostly vitality that encourages us to look beyond our assumptions of use associated with forms and objects. The bed burning video starts in darkness, implying an interior location. But then grass gradually becomes discernable, surprising us with the vision of a bed displaced into a field. Finally, streaks of the white ash that the bed has been reduced to harmoniously striate a now day-lit grassland. The life that the bed embodies is absorbed by the ongoing rhythms of nature.

Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker living in Cork City.

maximilianlecain.com

‘To Ashes’ ran at GOMA Waterford from 25 August to 1 October.

gomawaterford.ie

Evgeniya Martirosyan, Evanescence, 2022, video diptych; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy the artist and GOMA.

Evgeniya Martirosyan, To Ashes, 2021, installation with video projections; photograph by Jed Niezgoda, courtesy the artist and GOMA.

Kurnugia NOW!

CELINA MULDOON OUTLINES HER RECENT RESEARCH AND CURRENT EXHIBITION AT THE DOCK.

Celina Muldoon, ‘Kurnugia NOW!’, installation view, The Dock; photograph by Paul McCarthy, courtesy the artist and The Dock.

Celina Muldoon, ‘Kurnugia NOW!’, installation view, The Dock; photograph by Paul McCarthy, courtesy the artist and The Dock.

THIS SUMMER, RECORD-BREAKING heatwaves spread across Europe, North and South America, Australia, and the rest of the world. While some enjoyed the ‘beautiful’ weather, the terrifying reality of climate change cannot be ignored. I am afraid of what the future holds. I have learned that Climate Change conversations elicit responses that range from exasperation and hopelessness to shame or even absolute denial.

My recent research project and exhibition ‘Kurnugia NOW!’ arose from a desire to explore identity in the human brain. I wanted to investigate how identity is formed – how biological and environmental factors shape and mould one’s sense of self – and to unpick the specific social and political issues which may contribute to the development of the human brain. I am fortunate to know Dr Clare Kelly, Associate Professor in the Trinity Institute of Neurosciences in Trinity College Dublin, as we went to school together in Ballyshannon, County Donegal. I had just finished an exhibition series and was considering potential collaborations around behavioural science. At our 20-year school reunion in 2018, myself and Clare almost immediately began discussing these ideas. Since then, we have grown an interdisciplinary project involving multiple collaborations, which includes working with production company Sixbetween to develop the film piece Kurnugia NOW! (2022) and with German composer Moritz Fasbender to create the sound piece, Istar’s Planet (2022).

What has been revealed, through our collaborative research, is the need to examine the recurring links between climate change and anxiety, and how these influences shape our identity and understandings of ourselves in relation to time and place. In particular, we have been investigating how we might bring about behavioural change by accessing, drawing out, and exploring narrative identities. This has led to a combined collaboration with Dr Francis Ludlow and PhD candidate Rhonda McGovern in the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities (TCEH) at Trinity College

Dublin. Rhonda’s research is centred around reconstructing the climate of ancient Babylonia for the years 652- 61BCE, based on extracts from the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries. Because of my interest in re-imagining mythological stories and how this may link to climate change, I have been fascinated with her research for several years. Rhonda, Clare, and I believe in the power of storytelling in shaping our identity. We seek ways to affect behavioural change that would promote agency and unify the public.

Over a period of two years, we engaged in lengthy conversations on psychology, art, culture, and the environment. These conversations became the bedrock of our research, and we mobilised around areas which required further exploration. The project has become a platform for academic inquiry and collaboration, but it has also thrived as a space for solidarity and connection.

I have created a cross-disciplinary exhibition of moving image, installation, sculpture, and live performance at The Dock (10 September – 12 November 2022). The gallery spaces have been transformed into sites for collective engagement around what has become the most critical issues of our time: the climate and biodiversity crises. ‘Kurnugia NOW!’ re-imagines mythological narratives from ancient Babylonian, with the Goddess Ištar becoming the archetypal force around which the first part of this story unfolds. To accompany the exhibition, my collaborators and I have developed a publication which documents the interdisciplinary research project to date. This includes essays by Clare, Rhonda, and Dr Áine Phillips, articulating knowledge and expertise from their respective fields, in response to and in collaboration with ‘Kurnugia NOW!’.

Celina Muldoon is an artist based in Northwest Ireland. ‘Kurnugia NOW!’ continues at The Dock until 12 November.

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Celina Muldoon, ‘Kurnugia NOW!’, installation view, The Dock; photograph by Paul McCarthy, courtesy the artist and The Dock.

A Dormant Light

AENGUS WOODS REVIEWS LUCY MCKENNA’S SOLO EXHIBITION AT SOLSTICE ARTS CENTRE.

Lucy McKenna, Plantae Novae Ursinum Herba Salutaris: 1.8, 2.3, 2.6 & 3.1, 2022, archival ink on Hahnemühle photo rag; photograph by Lee Welch, courtesy of the artist and Solstice Arts Centre.

IN W.G. SEBALD’S final novel, Austerlitz (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001), there is a remarkable moment in which we are told of one Andre Hilary, a secondary school teacher, who presents the Napoleonic battle of Austerlitz to his young students in such incredible detail that they could see “the disposition of the regiments in their blue and white, green and blue uniforms, constantly forming into new patterns in the course of the battle like crystals of glass in kaleidoscope.” But for all the multitude of local colour and detail he might offer, Hilary laments that he could never supply enough to do justice to its reality because “it would take an endless length of time to describe the events of such a day properly, in some inconceivably complex form.”

A similar entanglement of time, complexity, and detail is at play in Lucy McKenna’s recent solo show, ‘A Dormant Light Resides in The Eye’ at Solstice Arts Centre (20 August – 22 October). It’s a varied and ambitious presentation spread across numerous rooms with forms, materials, motifs, and methods colliding, subtly implicating each other, and moving toward a cumulative effect, that of a set of works without clearly defined boundaries, orbiting around each other, pushing and pulling, while not settling into any kind of stability or fixed significance.

The exhibition title ‘A Dormant Light Resides in the Eye’ is drawn from Bright Colors Falsely Seen (Yale University Press, 1998), a history of synesthesia by Kevin T. Dann. Synesthesia is a neuropsychological trait in which the stimulation of one sense causes the automatic experience of another sense. This seems to offer McKenna both a starting point and a kind of modus operandi to explore the manner in which not only the senses but all kinds of phenomena can become implicated, intertwined, and bleed into one another.

Upon entering the gallery space, the viewer encounters a single

photographic print, a jagged clash of purples, greens and yellows; an amalgamation of plant life and inorganic material that seems both natural and unnatural, hovering somewhere between photograph and photogram. We then encounter in the first gallery a set of 16 framed carbon prints of plants with medicinal properties, hung in diamond form. These are juxtaposed with a separate, serial arrangement of hand-folded origami research notes. The notes themselves follow a paratactic, associative logic, running from Umberto Eco through quantum physics, evolutionary theory, folklore, and the colonisation of space. Directly opposite is a large-scale work composed of coloured, laser-cut plexi-glass shapes, arranged, overlaid, and reminiscent of the labyrinthine geometrics of microbial forms.

From these beginnings the show proceeds and grows, taking a vocabulary established in these initial offerings and expanding it, combining, recombining, and adding strategies and motifs in a manner suggestive of the complex connections between sense and affect, mind and body, space and time, nature and culture. A very beautiful set of works named Transients (2022) consists of a replay of the plexi-glass shapes already seen, but this time laid out on transparent shelves through which light is shone to create a kind of shadow writing on the walls. A nearby digital video work, The Cosmic Repeater (2022), consists of kaleidoscopic imagery, set to the disembodied voice of Google’s AI text-to-speech application, reading Carl Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1973), which seems to embed McKenna’s process within a recursive, vertiginous awareness of the infinitely expanding universe.

In the final room, a sculptural assemblage, Lentical I-IV (2022) throws some light upon the imagery and processes seen in the photographic works that punctuate the show. An arrangement of dichromatic plastics, torqued and crumpled using wire and steel then illuminated with spotlights, takes on a curiously plant-like form. Shot through with multicoloured hues, gentle reflections and refractions, the overall effect is that of an ethereal, three-dimensional instantiation of her photographic compositions.

Lentical I-IV shares space with a number of framed works on paper and a wall-hanging sculpture of lit globes that brings to mind the mutating topography of foam and bubbles. But the room is ultimately dominated by Holographus 1-5 (2020), a striking set of works spread out over five pedestals. On each pedestal is presented one small glass plate illuminated by a single adjustable light. Upon examination, each reveals a miniature universe, a holographic world of coloured points and stars with a depth of field distinctly at odds with the flat physicality of the plates themselves.

A particular strength of the show is the manner in which the individual works resonate with each other, deepening their significances and multiplying their points of reference until each is entangled in a web that seems to refer far beyond its own extremities. But such virtue also begs the question of how well the works stand up in isolation. Taken individually, a slight unevenness presents itself, with some pieces doing more conceptual spadework than others. But it’s a minor quibble at the end of the day; the show presents itself as a multi-stranded and multi-faceted unity, and it is best taken as such.

At all times within these works, McKenna seems most concerned with making sure that no single thing remains simply ‘what it is’. Sight becomes sound, color becomes shape, movement and stasis become in the end, barely distinguishable. The challenge that she sets herself in this show is to somehow present these processes in two registers simultaneously: that of the subject, and that of the universe.

As such, in these smooth elisions between light and material, the embodied and the intangible, we see something akin to the synesthetic process at work in real-time. However, in the synesthetic process so presented – with all its slippages and ambiguities, and its refusal to be pinned down by any discrete sense or concept – we also see the faint intimations of a kind of Heraclitean flux that implicates the viewer in a vast mutating reality.

Aengus Woods is a philosopher and critic based in Meath.

Lucy McKenna, Transients, 2022, acrylic, dimensions variable; photograph by Lee Welch, courtesy of the artist and Solstice Arts Centre.

Lucy McKenna, A Dormant Light, 2022, acrylic, steel; photograph by Lee Welch, courtesy of the artist and Solstice Arts Centre.

Lucy McKenna, Lenticel I, II, III & IV, 2022, steel, acrylic, dichromatic plastics, wire, light; photograph by Lee Welch, courtesy of the artist and Solstice Arts Centre

Staggering Verisimilitude

JONATHAN BRENNAN REVIEWS RON MUECK’S ONGOING SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE MAC IN BELFAST.

Ron Mueck, Woman with Sticks, 2009, painted silicone, polyurethane, steel, wood, synthetic hair, 170 x 183 x 120 cm, installation view, The MAC; photograph by Simon Mills, courtesy of the artist and The MAC.

VIEWING RON MUECK’S current show at The MAC (29 July – 5 November) I find myself grasping for reference points. Firstly, from art history: from seventeenth-century Spanish polychrome sculpture to the mutated and mutilated figures of the Chapman brothers; and then beyond, from the ‘plastinated’ bodies of Gunther von Hagens to the latest humanoid robots paraded in science fairs. Even childhood visits to the National Wax Museum in Dublin come to mind. However, in terms of uncanny hyperrealism, nothing comes close to Mueck’s rendering of the human form in all its uncompromising detail.

Early in his career, Rodin was accused of ‘casting from life’ to create his life-sized figure, The Age of Bronze (1875). Similarly here, one wonders what sorcery is at play. Insights into the artist’s meticulous and laborious processes are provided via Gautier Deblonde’s photographs and a video of Mueck at work in his studio, that bookend this presentation of seven of the artist’s major works.

Youth (2009/11) is a diminutive, barefoot, black teenager in low-slung jeans and white t-shirt, which he lifts up to display a bloody stab-wound to his abdomen. The blood has spread, seeping through his raised garment. As he strains to see his exposed flesh below, his expression – mouth open, eyebrows raised – is less of horror than of incredulity; he is simultaneously Christ and Doubting Thomas. Again, I’m struck by the lack of reference points, such as the dearth of ethnic minorities represented in sculptural form in museums, galleries, and public sculpture. I’m also reminded of the spate of stabbing-related mortalities in London, which reached record heights in 2008, one year before the piece’s completion.

The first and most obvious reaction to the artwork in this extraordinary show is simply to marvel at their staggering verisimilitude and attention to detail. This draws you in and really can-

not be overstated. Skin can be mottled and babylike, or scratched and weather-beaten; hair can be stubbled or wispy, limp or wiry. Some figures show traces of dirt in pores or under fingernails and toenails. In Mother and Child (2003), the even sheen of amniotic fluid that dribbles from a new-born and pools on its mother’s chest is subtly differentiated from the specks of perspiration on her brow, arising from the efforts of labour. This latter piece depicts the moment where a baby has been placed on the still-swollen belly of its naked mother, before the umbilical cord has been cut. It is usually represented, in film and television, as a moment of exasperated joy and relief. Here, however, the mother’s arms remain clamped to her sides, her expression inscrutable; is it bemused or sinister, melancholic, or simply exhausted? In any case, the usual cultural portrayal – itself unrealistic – has been subverted.

Woman with Shopping (2013) is the same ‘person’, now fully clothed and upright. Her arms are still pressed to her sides, this time weighed down with plastic shopping bags, filled with mundane grocery items. The baby still gazes upwards in the same position, this time harnessed inside her bulging overcoat. The woman is still the carer and the bearer, her hands still unable to cradle, her expression still enigmatic.

The second constant in Mueck’s work is his play with scale. His breakthrough piece, Dead Dad (1996- 7), depicts the naked corpse of the artist’s own father, resting heavily on its greyish flesh. This sculpture is half life-size, while the reclining female figure of In Bed (2005) is a vast 6.5 metres in length. With Dead Dad, diminution bring pathos to a stark and clinical form, the bleakness of the subject matter ironically magnified. The emotional impact of enlargement however is harder to pinpoint beyond the initial sense of awe. For example, Dark Place (2018) is a 1.5-metre-tall, disembodied head, which verges on menacing. However, this could be due to its contrived setting in a black, narrow-apertured room and a single spotlight. The mountainous figure of In Bed, with knees raised, and one hand pressed to her cheek, is melancholy and lost in thought. Here the exaggerated scale suggests some monumental inner turmoil, as if she were incapable of leaving the bed, powerless to follow her far-off gaze.

With almost all of the figures in this show, including the fairy tale-like Woman with Sticks (2009), it is tempting –perhaps even inevitable – to attempt to read the expressions of the figures or to position oneself deliberately in their lines of sight. When I do so, there are flickering moments where I feel I’m the one being observed. An invigilator recounts the different reactions to Dead Dad – from the tittering of children to a woman who immediately burst into tears. I witness a group expressing a desire to bundle the new-born baby up in their arms. It would seem that this human impulse to imagine narratives says as much about us as viewers as about the works themselves.

Jonathan Brennan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Belfast.

Ron Mueck, In Bed, 2005, mixed media, 162 x 650 x 395 cm, installation view, The MAC; photograph by PressEye, courtesy of the artist and The MAC.

Ron Mueck, Youth, 2009/11, mixed media, 65 × 28 × 16 cm, installation view, The MAC; photograph by PressEye, courtesy of the artist and The MAC.