PART 1: NUTS AND BOLTS

This is a first time show; a one time show. Those that went to the opening, those that saw it coming together, missed out, forever. If you are an artist or you want to love art outside your own art, outside yourself, never be a technician, administrator, and so on in the gallery setting. The nuts and bolts of art in the gallery ought to stay out of sight and mind for art to be respected, loved or bottom-line experienced. I'm not talking about some fascist purity—the experience of art in the gallery is always impure (whereas the experience of art in the studio is the purist you are going to get). The gallery is purgatory for the artist, where art is held in abeyance before the ups and downs of the public mood. The experience of art in the gallery has to surmount all unforeseen obstacles before it can be attended to fully. And in this small art scene you are probably going to run into someone you know in the virtual or the real real, if you've been around the block a few times. Either way circumstance is either going to get in the way or enrich your experience of art in the gallery. The variables are tantamount to a tragedy. So when you ask someone "What did you think of Jaki Irvine at Kerlin Gallery Dublin?" what you are really asking is "Did everything fall into place the day of your visit?" "Did you bring your best game?" "Did you leave your shit outside the door?" "Did you fuck it up in some way that was not in the artist's or artworks' favour?" Or was the stage-setting perfect and the art just didn't work out or live up to its promise? This can happen. The promise of art usually ends up a lie. Timing and other stuff got the artist here and timing and other stuff will determine the experience of her art here. What I am saying is, for art to have a chance of changing you chemically, and it has that power, the dumb intuitive process of putting art on a wall or floor cannot be your preview, neither imagined nor thought about at all. Those whom I now casually refer to as the art administration, because they make up the most part of the visible art scene, sacrifice their experiences of art in their places of work. (They go elsewhere for the high.) To see art rolled out before you without the scaffold and masking tape and paint caught in the wind-wipers is art's best chance of remaining enigmatic and equal if not stronger than its observer. This is especially true of Jaki Irvine's current immersive exhibition at Kerlin Gallery who, it must be known by the reader, was in the gallery with a group of friends when I topped the stairs after slipping past the ajar office on the first floor to find myself bathed in pulsing light and reckless sound as if sealed in the clam of a sun bed with headphones on. I didn't blush—it was the light. I don't know Jaki personally or her me, which was best for the art in this instance, as anything more would have meant fawning social protocol where the unsaid is smothered in hugs and kisses and cliched gulps of enthusiasm. Especially with this work that dispenses the art gallery ethic of distance, silence and pause for a more head-back convertible joyride, where body not just eyes become the receptors of the gravity of art experience.

PART 2: SPLINTERVILLE

Sometimes I come out of an exhibition and feel like I have taken something significant, changing my chemistry. My jaw replaces my skullcap, my teeth gnaw on my brain, speaking memory, feeling, sensation. It all happens in one instant. I am coming down now as I write this two days later. The big stairway entrance into the mothership of motherships flooded in pink twilight and chattering rhapsody before, as mentioned in passing earlier, I rounded the corner. That jab of light and sound and I was already goofing off on the stairs. Then the clarity issued from the screens, too many screens, too much neon text, too much colour… the way you see things more clearly underwater, colour saturated, edges smudged with a kind of saturation of colour that isn’t found in reality, maybe painting, or at animal level when the sun comes crashing down and the light flares between trees and midges in an extinction burst before everything settles into itself, the cymbals of nature subside….. Still rounding the corner where the pink twilight— delight or warning—dissolves the first-floor office behind where business-as-usual machinations are speculated upon, above Jaki Irvine is in the gallery with friends enjoying each other in the mist of her art. NOT IN MOTELVILLE ANYMORE evocation splinters into the memory of experiencing Jaki Irvine give a visiting lecturer at IADT almost 20 years ago when I was an art student there. The portrait she left of the artist was one without ego, someone who looks at the world in a very different way and then redescribes it in a very different way. My goal from that day onwards was to look at the world awry, astray, so as to distill something that might command attention without demanding attention. TO SEE AROUND CORNERS. This is not fight or flight. This is not propaganda. This is flirt or flit with the world to reveal its essences, the parts of the sum; a democratisation of the moral and the aesthetic. Back then I was mesmerised by Jaki Irvine's work and her way of whispering the essence of her ongoing project, a project at once poetic and vital and somehow foreign; wherein we travel to far flung spaces through the light or sound thrown from the languid confinement of her films, a sound, a chorus, a repetition, an absurdity. Art was presented that day untethered, floating, but interconnected with the world through an animal sense, like a dog whistle emanating strings that fan out into a vibrating galaxy. Jaki Irvine isn’t demanding too much of your attention here. The films are narrative blinks, documenting fleeting moments, flirting with the world, a missed wink, nod, flit, social advance. Nothing much happens within everything happening at once. It's the present tense. The first-person narrator. “God”: a three letter word can be awesome. A sense of brevity, although a composition that is full, whole, colour, sound, language. Language is being critiqued here, broken up, from silly to sublime—the Neil Diamond song "Cracklin' Rosie". These are just words, broken words, maybe broken-hearted words, always lacking in their abbreviation of the world, what Derrida saw so clearly. A word is always an abbreviation in terms of the world. A lone neon apostrophe substituting g in "Cracklin’ seems to almost float away in this submerged environment where anything not fully tethered to its cursive union would be lost to the cruel world outside.

PART 3: WORD SOUP = WOOD SPUR

There's something about ENTERTAINMENT that Jaki Irvine's exhibition asks us to consider (or reconsider). We should be weary of exhibitions that are entertaining, that lay all the guns out on the motel mattress where all the excess of love and lust stains the stripped-back bed sheets, where the sticky-out springs and the rusted coin dispenser hungers for good vibrations, where neon smears everything. All those guns, from chrome romancers to dusky pragmatists, laid out like pick 'n' mix. All or nothing the excessive says loudly. We have artists that are ‘excessives’ and artists that curtsy in gallery. The excessives, the only ones we need to address here, we dutifully describe as ‘generous’. We have a few, like Alan Butler, Nevan Lahart, Alan Phelan and today, Jaki Irvine. STILL IN MOTELVILLE: excessives are first-person shooters in the zombie apocalypse; the diaristic PI with the tormented soliloquy piecing together the man while he pieces together the crime; the good vigilante; the desirous artist. These evocations all come in a flash after topping the stairs of the Kerlin Gallery to be met by the work up close and all around with the artist in the far distance with friends. I really don't know if we experience art in the present. Perhaps it's all evocation. Poetry is evocation. It's evocative of so much here, so much memory, generous in the sense that Jaki Irvine doesn't prescribe a narrative, mostly. Images jitter with evocation, with a mannequin's hand extended without lines or hardship or voodoo readings inscribed, just smooth, gliding through the air with good vibrations. Evocation especially when I write inside the memory of experiencing Jaki Irvine's work again and again and again at Kerlin Gallery and elsewhere days and nights after experiencing the work in person. It's all enmeshed. Still in MOTELVILLE: smeared in a pink glow from the 1970s neon motel sign hung outside with rusted orange brackets complementing the brown curtains and yellowed lace that belly dance in the window on some foreign when? and where? the artist sits on a bed surrounded by scissoring notebooks with bedspring handwriting spelling out "Cracklin' Rosie" over and over and over again in some effort to remember an experience through a lyric that once was tethered to an experience but now needs to be willed back into the present, a present without its own song. "Cracklin' Rosie" "Cracklin' Rosie" "Cracklin' Rosie". Of course this is not the Jaki Irvine exhibition at Kerlin Gallery Dublin. This is an evocation, just most of us don't spell evocations out.

PART 4: COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Jaki Irvine has removed all the adjectives from MOTELVILLE: the brown furniture, the dirty bed sheets, the yeasted carpet, the crazy wallpaper, the sad adultery. What is left is a nebulous equation that adds up without proof because nothing speaks in full sentences. We have some views, signposts to Alzheimer’s that manifest in the breaks and shuffling of language, over and over again—repetition being a way to remember or memorialise. We are also proffered on one of the smaller screens a stack of purple coffins beyond an orange bird feeder, alien complementaries—sweet, exotic, tropical—feeding the dream state of this exhibition. In a way the coffins give too much away. This image has a story, an implication, it haunts, it's kitsch, like my motel analogy. Aside from this we have nature, birds flying here and there, a skittish view of the world at arms length. This is bliss; ecstasy at the end of something. It makes you smile. It makes you sad. It's a distillation of one lyric and one view into more lyrics and more views. Wringing out the tears. There is a sadness here that you want to wallow in, a yearning lyric that brings all the fractured text and images towards completion, but never complete, always incomplete. This video installation with its neon, wired, vocal doodles is contained like one body of water within an aquarium. The word “Alzheimer's" in the press release breaks the reverie with its nods to a loss of time and mind. Jaki Irvine must understand the gravity of this pronunciation in a press release—neon turns to noir in its dark light. The lazy will use it as moral justification, a hook to sentimentalise the aesthetic, and assume there is personal justification for it to appear here in text. Nothing is said about the obvious terribleness of the disease and its "collateral damage"—a phrase today that is equated with war and the violent rape of innocence. Further, this work might serve as a “respite” or “mourning” of that sense of self. This admission suggests that art does not correspond to reality, the same way language cannot. Art can only pause things so you might be able to redescribe reality in a new way that is comforting. You are not being asked to bare one’s frustrations here, you are being invited into the fray of sensory experience, Sontag style. This exhibition is milky, close, cursive, emanating a glow that wraps around your senses in a pink embrace, a neon noir. An exhibition a long time coming but one that distills time into a moment that you'd like to last. But as said in the beginning, "This is a first time show; a one time show."