GOMA Waterford is an artist-led space. Ciara Rodgers’ work suits GOMA’s utilitarian aesthetic.

It’s all very dialectic: Rodgers’ forms say one thing, the titles sing another, like — Oh Bondage! Up Yours!

Who do we believe? Image? Text? It doesn’t matter. The modernist’s purity of form is as culturally radical as the aesthetic of Wimbledon. Or is the new word not radical but “Radicant”? An old & academic word by now. Yet not as Daz-white clean as Wimbledon. If you discount tennis racket technology & Hawkeye as cultural progress.

In fact, GOMA plus Rodgers as an accidental collaboration is all very 2009, when serial squatter NAMA evicted the Irish populace en masse, & Nicolas Bourriaud claimed a new fate for modernism in two words that set the scene for the next decade (“Altermodernity”) & its antihero protagonist (the “Radicant”):

To be radicant: it means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviours, exchanging rather than imposing.

Bourriaud’s Radicant is then, now & forever. It shows its two-faces again in Rogers’ bedraggled formalist curlicues, made from building materials or inferring the built urban environment in a dreamy palette of lemon, pink & cerulean. The opposition or collaboration between ideas & forms in Rodgers’ work gives the insight that ideas float & materials are just apples that drop from trees.

The artist's paper-cast bricks are not political brickbats, they are the chewing gum found under the classroom desk or urban handrail. They are radical in their interiority & navel gazing; a private revolution that makes you go ugh or gag when you reach too far with your naked fingers under the crotch of the institution.

This is all aesthetically in keeping with GOMA’s voyeuristic & vulgar architecture, with its electrical sockets, wall scars & paint-spitted floors. Reminiscent of the injection of Aleana Egan’s formalism into Temple Bar Gallery Dublin in the Autumn of 2009. A few years before the Spring of the empyrean cleanliness of Egan’s commercial gallery career at Kerlin Gallery Dublin.

The dance of holding form & withholding content is Rodgers’ rhetorical dance between the dinge, dirt, debris & decay at GOMA. Materials float & folly like marshmallow speech bubbles in a pink & silent “rosy-fingered dawn” as gum-chewing Homer put it in The Odyssey.

Rodgers’ scattershot analogue Polaroids (ala Sophie Calle) & softly-softly staging of colour (ala Franz West) without much tone, except as half (ala Sigmar Polke) is a joy to see, & a sadness to reflect upon regarding what has been lost in the shuffle of history.

Ciara Rodgers’ installation at GOMA reflects a time when artists truly experimented & broke the frame of art under the shelter & support of an efflorescent artist-led DIY culture. With risk comes apples.

Through 13 July 2024