COVID GALLERY.
“So it speaks in the second person.”
“all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
It is raining grey. You booked; there is no queue. You are surprised, surprisingly. You push & pull at the alternating locked & unlocked doors. Through the glass doors darkly you register a masked figure gesturing ‘enter’. Again, you idiot fumble between push & pull to finally enter.
‘You booked?’
‘Yes’
‘Name?’
‘You’
‘There you are!’
‘Great!’
‘There is sanitizer & face masks (you are not wearing one) over there. Would you mind? even though there are no other visitors. Best to comply with the rules.’
You comply.
A Janus-faced arrow reiterates in grey the rule-bound environment on the steps that lead you to the lobby area of the art centre. Step by step the dress rehearsal of sanitizer, mask & markings tendrils into your conscious experience. You wade on.
The lobby looks out onto a pond with reeds & goldfish vibrating gently under the surface of curlicue concentrics caused by the grey downpour. The noise is a collective din. The mask clamped to your face gets tighter as you imagine the crucible of oxygen that swirls between the lively elements outside.
Between & parallel to this competing image, this alive image, this moving image, stray artworks awkwardly straddle the grey floor & grey marble wall of the grey lobby. If not always by you, art is always compromised by its environment.
The gallery banner reads ARTWORKS 2020 - The Sky is Blue - VISUAL Annual Open Submission and Art Award. You make a decision to experience all these peripheral & seemingly arbitrary artworks in one go to bring some cohesion to your experience. You fail. The Sky is not blue.
Another banner signposts Sibyl Montague's mishmash mâché of masticated food & pulp & everything stuffs that sit spaced & stagnant on the floor, or dangling from the ceiling like the pulled legs of insects. You notice the space between & around the stuff is fatter, maybe 2-metres fatter, than the things themselves.
Before all this you admit to yourself that art, for you, was as much about the negative spaces that flowed through & around art as the objects themselves. Context was another negative space that defined your experience, your criticism. Today you feel the negative space between the artworks is more palpable, heavy, visible, & this positive negation mirrors the enforced spaces & social tension between people, between things, between what is said & left unsaid due to the ever widening social gap between people.
Your eyes range the lobby to catch sight of another visitor. Someone you might know? Definitely! Face masks make you a bad witness though…..You stall.
You wait in the lobby trying & failing again to engage with ARTWORKS before entering the main gallery where Katie Holten's tree alphabet stamps the walls with black silhouettes of conifer, deciduous & ogham characters. One large silhouette of a tree takes your breath away, scaling the heights of the too tall art space. You realise, against this tall drink of ink, everything lies low, horizontal, measured, like a static, simple, square, modernist clock without dials. Beckett. Tick tock. You wait.
You sneak upstairs where ARTWORKS continues… You are familiar with most of the artists & work here, especially the painters, who are all individually wrapped in their own private concerns.
Beyond, in the darker dark, Ben Rivers' 45-minute film, resplendent & ravishing in dusty analogue, romantically traverses the anthropocene in geographies removed but increasingly tainted by modern civilisation. You remember Ben Rivers' hut from his solo show some years back at the Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin. You thought the name “Rivers” suited his work. You remember the children rummaging in a black & white wilderness. You feel the same feelings here but they are bigger: the large projection too big, the sound surrounding, the dark thick with big absence. You wonder where the other visitor is now.
The film drifts along in chapters denoted by calendar month. Time is branched two-handed: the small hand fingering beauty, the big hand shaking a scolding finger at civilisation. You find it all out of time, dug up from the ruins, a beautiful, anachronistic aesthetic, thoughtfully & luxuriously ruminating on nature & civilisation & its discontents, its end. But the billions of years represented by the layer cake of heaving earth - the ‘Ghost Strata’ - shows how such blips in history, like war & disease & Now, are just stray eyelashes hanging from the giant eye of deep time, a deep deep time ultimately grinding you down against the stray eyelashes of progress in your ongoing defence & ingenuity against what nature throws at you.
You blink.
A Tarot reading closes the film. It is all bad, but not to worry, they are just cards. Lee Welch, represented by a painting of a Tarot angel in the adjacent upstairs lobby, once gave you a Tarot reading. You found out you were split between two ‘Yous’.
You blink.
‘Hello!’
‘How have you been?’