If I had the money or desire, I wouldn’t buy Hannah Fitz’s gallery furniture. But I sure can look at it, and, at times, peer through & into it, when granted access that is.

The exhibition title says it all & more: “Lookieloos”. In the late Dave Hickey’s terminology “Looky-Loos” (spelt with a hyphen & y) is someone who looks but doesn’t participate. Hickey, former Rolling Stone gonzo-journalist turned artworld philosopher-critic, uses the country & western singer Waylon Jennings’ transitional experience of gigging local bars to big stadiums, as a way to define the looky-loo in his essay Romancing the Looky-Loos. Told against the lie of nostalgia, Waylon confesses to Hickey that when he played local bars the audience understood & felt — in a deep-seated way — what the lyrics & music meant, because they had lived it all, with Waylon as a friend, enemy, lover, neighbour. Contra the local bar coterie, the stadium audience is more separate & detached, not just in scale & architecture, but in every way. The stadium audience looks but doesn't participate. That said, there is an obvious distinction here between looking & listening to music versus the weird experience of visual art.

My experience of Hannah Fitz’s work has gone from local bar (artist-run) to relative stadium (Kerlin Gallery Dublin) over a ten-year period. There has always been a quirksome & wonky quality to the way Hannah Fitz sees, makes & presents things. At Kerlin we are presented with a setting straight out of an EZ LIVING warehouse. Lit lamp shades stand tall & slender & funereal against metal railings with run-of-the-mill curlicue tracery. Fat timber cabinets & closets bully in on this quaint & melancholic Journey's End. At first glance the furniture doors & drawers seem partly open. An effort to peek in a closet is met by a skin of timber. No access. The only points of access are bored holes a la Pinocchio’s nostrils, which glare back like stars.

There’s other stuff here too, like the meandering figurines that visually narrate through fishing rods, kite, tree stump & so on. These are more objects than gestures. It all reminds me of John Boskovich’s ‘Psycho Salon’, “the living room inside the artist’s fabled, hyper-designed digs in West Hollywood… a place that made no distinctions between sculpture & furniture, curation & decor, art & everyday life”. While Boskovich’s was “schlock apocalypse”, Fitz’s formal homogeneity, upset by a tasteful quirk here & there, makes this into one monster bound by the bind of the commodity versus experience of the commercial gallery. Through one veil this is a showroom, through another a salesroom, and yet another a window display. I know we are supposed to forget all this, but this makes me remember. And yet I have no fantasy to buy. The rub of art is enough.