Tuesday, May 12, 2015

The Parallax View

The Parallax View
Alan Butler, curated by Niamh Brown

Ormston House, Limerick
12 December 2014 – 31 January 2015 

Review by Jim Ricks


As the end of Alan Butler's solo exhibition, The Parallax View, loomed, on impulse I bought a same-day return ticket from Dublin to Limerick. Up far earlier than usual to catch a 10 o'clock, and in a half sleep, half caffeinated delirium, I decided to perform. 

The performance took place on Twitter. I declared a very self-reflexive, so much meta, self-aware, double irony Live Tweeting of my v important trip that day. A few tweets in I declared the need for a hashtag. 

#triptoprallaxview 

Curated by Niamh Brown, the show pairs Butler and the University of Limerick Art Collections (ULAC). Ormston House's press clearly describes the overall approach:

“In this exhibition, the artist interweaves pieces from the collections with new works that have been produced through the outsourcing of labour to individuals and apps online, at various stages of the creative process.”



From what I understand Brown constructed the plan and got both parties on board, then worked closely with Butler in the selection and production process. Srsly exciting stuff really. ULAC isn't something I previously knew anything about, although I'm not surprised at their existence. Butler's work is something I know a bit about. Old meets new, in actual fact.

From the installation, Internet Über Alles, 2012 at Rua Red.  Photo: Davey Moor.

But Alan Butler's work isn't something I'd find terribly easy to describe either. It is loud, colourful, borderline obnoxious, usually has some type of massive wall sticker installation, topical, current, often something is spinning, almost exclusively uses the internet to source information and often to produce results, is preoccupied with the cyber-political, and, I'd add, it is all done with a slightly jaded anarcho-comic bent to it all.

On Butler's website there is a single text which towards the end says this about his work:


작가의 작품들에서 인터넷이 가진 편재성은 그것이 개발국들에서 사는 우리의 삶 속에 편재함을 나타내고 있다. 인터넷 접속은 이제 전기나 흐르는 물처럼 산업과 일상 생활 모두에 필수적인 것으로 인식되고 있는데, 이에 대해 버틀러는 우리는 과연 실제로 우리가 생각하는 만큼 정보를 자유롭게 얻고 있는가를 묻고, 우리로 하여금 스스로 ‘그래서 이 많은 정보는 다 가져서 무얼 한단 말인가?’는 의문을 갖게 한다.

After several attempts to track down the English version (Butler suggested I enroll in evening Korean classes) Google told me Lane Booth [sic] of Temple Bar Gallery & Studios wrote the piece and that the above approximately means:


“With the ubiquity of the Internet in the work of the author shows that it also omnipresent in our lives living in developed countries are. The internet is now recognized as essential to both industry and daily life, like electricity or running water, so for Butler is actually asking whether we really free to use information gained as much as we think, makes us ourselves, so a lot of information You mean one gajyeoseo is doing? "is wondering.”

Aside from gajyeoseo, I get the gist. His work isn't about the internet, but an incidentally practical product of it.




The Parallax View is also the title of a 2006 Slavoj Žižek book. Žižek ambitiously tries to update dialectical materialism or at least lend it to contemporary politics theoretically. Both Butler and Žižek are referring to the effect that occurs when an object is viewed from different positions. Most commonly this term is used in photography, usually with a viewfinder camera at close range, to describe the gap between what the viewfinder sees and what the lens is capturing. Or with film/video, as the viewpoint moves from side to side, the objects in the distance appear to move more slowly than the objects close to the camera. 


 
There are other examples: in astronomy stars have different relationships to each other as the Earth moves in its orbit, but in general parallax is a difference in the apparent position of an object. It is this gap, this different perspective, that Butler is ultimately describing with his show. I think it can be further interpreted as a gap in time, highlighted through technology, with which the artist is playing.



Ormston House itself is an elegant showroom from another epoch. A central square column, a pier, rises to the lofty ceiling above. Mirrors adorn its sides. Large windows showcase the gallery off of one of central Limerick's main streets.


At the gallery entrance we are greeted by a desk and body behind it. A temporary wall has been built, partitioning the normally open and capacious space. It leads us through a short, narrow entrance passage. We know we are in an Alan Butler show because in this passage there is an inexplicably large wall mural sticker featuring piles of iPhone 4s. Only the backsides are revealed, perhaps hinting at the camera functionality of this ubiquitous device. A more traditionally sized digital print is hung on top (a Martin Parr remake it turns out). Much is happening in it, I am curious, so walk on into the main space.



He selected works from the ULAC I'm guessing for the anticipated political, visual, and, occasionally, personal potential in making his knock-offs. Thin banners drop from the ceiling. Historical paintings hang. Videos play. Sculptures spin. In the back corner, the curators curate next to a large space heater.


Pairing the dusty collection with new solutions available from sites like fiverr.com or by emailing a painting factory in China, Butler is making comparisons. A video collage based symbolically on a very Socialist Realism style painting, complete with glorified industry and presumable 'leaders' plays centrally. There is another video with tweets about Damien Hirst, a work he couldn't borrow. An Adobe Illustrator 'how to' YouTube video is placed aside its inspiration: a Hokusai print. Old Japanese Kimonos hang side-by-side 'all over' digitally printed t-shirts, rainbow covered in emojis. These clothing 'resemblances' are the biggest stretch in the show, and I don't think they work as artwork (although pretty damn cool just as t-shirts). 


A photo posted by Jim Ricks (@therealjimricks) on




The Siobhán Hapaska is one of the few contemporary pieces selected from ULAC. Its mixed materiality lends to interesting interpretations. The original has a stuffed bear(?) on the back of a clay reindeer, which bears a fuzzy puff-ball hat and a red nose. Butler 3D scanned it twice, once through a display case, and 3D printed it in a synthetic bronze plastic. He positions Hapaska's high on plinth some distance from the new versions. These spin, placed below eye level, and we are free to observe all sides easily. It is a study in distortion. Soft materials reconstructed as solids. Limitations in how the 3D scanner 'knew' the original are revealed in both takes.

 

But Butler's corner installation steals the show. Working from the same methodological premise, but with an encompassing exactitude. This piece TF;DG (Too Far; Didn't Go) summarises the entirety of the show's concept perfectly. Butler has installed one of his signature vinyl wall sticker pieces. Broad stripes of the Google colours of red, yellow, blue, and green ascend to the ceiling, the iconic Google Maps pin is placed in a rhythmic pattern forming a lurid wallpaper that wraps around the corner of the recessed gallery nook. 

Scattered across the Google field are a number of pairings, 13 to be exact or a total of 26 works. A painting of, almost exclusively, Dublin is paired with a watercolour, made in China, of a Google Maps screen grab of the same location. Taking landscape works of unknown historic or economic value and filtering them through Google's literal lens and then again through the hands and eyes of an anonymous factory worker (artisan?). The layers add up. The title has sarcastic bite (especially considering the fact that many of Butler's Dublin peers would have not made it to this Limerick exhibition). And it is an apt portrait of today, at least in the Developed/Post-Modern/First World: technology's screens provide a surrogate reality to the global privileged, and actual production of goods has moved to, and created a new reality for, the former/semi-colonial world.


The show is essentially an exploration of divergence through market exchange. And while through the constant comparisons and translations new contemporary 'accents' come through, it should be said, and just to be kinda critical, the selections of works in ULAC and the imitative responses Butler created seem repetitive and arbitrary at times.



The Parallax View was diverse and utilised heterogenous strategies for outsourcing and producing imitations from an interesting, under-resourced University collection. The overall visual style was immersive and invigorating. It was accessible in its use of popular references. The Parallax View conquers the unwieldy, glassy, and high ceiling-ed space of Ormston House. And significantly, it was fun, covering a range of mediums and solutions to the 'problem' Niamh Brown and Alan Butler set forth. 

The varied strategies to reproducing the collection knowingly yield flawed and foibled knock-offs, all filtered through the lens of Butler's outsourcing and political knowledge. It is cheap, crass, and cheeky, and I mean that in a good way. It is also the kind of idea that has legs and could go on forever, but I also hope it doesn't. 

Definitely not TF; and I Did Go. And I did very much enjoy my #triptoparallaxview.



Photos courtesy the artist and Ormston House unless otherwise indicated.






Thursday, April 2, 2015

Intervention to The Treaty Stone (It's a wrap)

Intervention to The Treaty Stone (It's a wrap)
Artist unknown
Limerick

April 2015

Photos by Dave Upton







Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Lacuna in Parallax


Lacuna in Parallax
Lucy McKenna
The Source, Thurles
12 September - 25 October 2014

by Jim Ricks

The thing about symmetry is that the beholder is positioned at the centre of the image”1


 


A train journey south towards Limerick on an overcast day brought me to Thurles, Co. Tipperary. Rising out of a wholly typical Irish place (and its pubs, takeaways, banks, butchers, Norman tower house, slow moving river, etc.) was the completely unexpected, substantial zinc-clad trapezoid edifice of The Source. Minus the apparently unsustainable cafe, it appears to be a rare exception to the prevalently mediocre Tiger-era county art centres.



Behind a massive sliding door lies a blacked out gallery. The lighting takes immediate significance. The artist, Lucy McKenna, created an atmospheric installation by way of a pragmatic stellar microcosm; tiny luminous points hovering individually in front of, or over each of her works.

  

The exception to this is the large sculptural piece titled Bridge. Light emanates from within the descending cylinder of golden metallic beads, installed centre stage. Perhaps it is a nod to Hollywood science fiction, a Star Trek transporter or even a  stargate. 


A golden disc projected through space and time, individual atoms of light held together through glimmering strings, it becomes the metaphorical sun. McKenna's show becomes heliocentric. And while I'm sure this is actually a symbolic reference to metaphysics or the Einstein-Rosen-bridge, I can't help but think this piece is largely decorative.

Taking varied, yet related circular forms, are a number of kaleidoscopic stargazing photos, all formally Hadron Collider-like, if you will. Some are wall mounted discs. Other sculptural ones are positioned on the floor. Collectively this visual presentation points to an underlying fascination with symmetric patterns occurring in nature, physics. The human intervention, repetition of these celestial 'shards', creates a sense of order and pattern, and, in particular the curved-bottom grounded constructions, recall baskets and bead work. The interstellar strung together.



Another prominent piece is We Didn'tMove, an 8mm to video transfer, which is projected high on the gallery's long wall. The footage of trees and flowers is filmed at Montpelier Hill in Dublin, a site of apparent frequent UFO sightings. A mirror effect is applied, and a layered, echoey voice-over recounts a story of a nocturnal invader. Although my first reaction was to cringe at a tale of real human abuse, no doubt the product of a post-Murphy-Report Ireland, the repeating narrative is ultimately of alien visitations.

The strongest works in the show, and what I would guess are the most involved, were exceptionally detailed pencil drawings of the cosmos. Four of them in total, McKenna explains on her website that “two of the works, Herschel and Rosetta were a collaboration with astronomer Nick Howes, wherein I drew some of his photographs of distant man-made spacecraft.” No doubt pieced together from square source photos, both are strangely pyramidal in shape. Stars streak across, activating them as the shapes become objects with cartoon motion lines. With its jagged base, it recalls the shape of the Stealth Bomber, or, equally, Carl Andre's corner metal triangle installations.

 
The other two painstakingly crafted drawings have this same shape, only removed like a missing piece of a puzzle. These, in contrast, are static. They are NGC 346 and LH 95, drawn from photos of of gaseous nebula from 'neighbouring' galaxies recorded from light traveling hundreds of thousands of years. The sense of time is heightened with McKenna's own investment of time. The dark matter of graphite is capable of holding the viewer. [Insert gravity pun here.]



This same shape is repeated thrice in a triptych, this time photographs clearly digitally stitched together from Google Maps imagery. These earthward looking images are local, coming from a period of research in the immediate area before the exhibition. All feature ring forts within a patchwork of towns, agricultural enclosures, and differing exposures, colour balances. 



Two strands of work in Lacuna in Parallax become distinct. One is with the artists research in Thurles around early Middle Age structures and looking downward on them through satellite photography. The other deals with looking upward, outward to the skies above. Both are connected by considering the passage of time. Distant star's light takes thousands, millions of years to arrive to Earth, emanating before our worldly ruins were even begun and visible only to us today. And how little we know about either.


Hand folded origami paper individually belted to the wall serve as the accompanying gallery text, Notes on Perception, Reality and Ringforts, while functioning also as installation. The (slightly difficult to read) text expounds a number of the artist's teleological musings and citations ranging from string theory, 'fairy forts', symmetry, kaleidoscopes, perception, time... It is essential to the exhibition, adding value to the works via McKenna's research.

Within the generous trapezoid gallery of The Source, the shape of McKenna's show is well rounded. She explores a number of themes within, from the local to the intergalactic, presenting them with polish, and handling the space adeptly through this multidisciplinary installation. Unfortunately, I feel the earthbound works on their own explore previously trodden territory. And those kaleidoscopic, from 'out of this world', are somewhat... distant. Both become background to the series of drawings, so deftly executed and gorgeous, manifested through a rare moment of collaborative focus between artist and scientist. 



Without focus and background, and ground for that matter, humankind has little way of understanding our own place within the biggest subject matter ever: the scale of the known universe.




1 From Notes on Perception, Reality and Ringforts.