Review by Rachel Warriner

Entering the old FAS building on Sullivan’s Quay is in itself a bit of an uncanny experience – the terrifying anxiety about tax interviews that lingers in the walls, and the memories of VRT monies past (and the things you could have spent them on) floats just beneath perception. Even without the effects of an irrational fear of bureaucracy, the FAS building actually works well as the setting for an exhibition based around themes of the uncanny: the walls crumble, the automatic front doors need to be slid open by hand, signs point to no longer existent offices and counters. It would be a shame, then, that most of the pieces in Uncanny Sound in Tactic Cork are not strictly uncanny, if this wasn’t a compelling and well conceived exhibition in which the works fit neatly together in a coherent way. Curated by Liam Slevin, Uncanny Sound is a dark and brooding experience that builds convincingly on a type of practice and aesthetic that seems particularly relevant in the wider context of Cork City at present.

When it comes to uncanniness, the most successful of these is Jessica Conway’s video piece Hih Hih, the visual part of which is obscured on first entering the gallery. Its soundtrack echoes through the space to meet you even before you enter the dim and shadowy room. It is a terrifying and demented laugh, the kind that reminds of evil clowns in horror movies. Walking around the space, looking at the other works, a subconscious picture of the laughing figure is built, but this picture is only brought to your attention upon encountering a small television screen with a single image of white sans serif text that reads ‘Hih Hih’. The jolt of unconscious expectations being brought suddenly into attention is a type of uncanny occurrence; the familiar becoming suddenly unfamiliar, a rupture in the seamlessness of experience. The shock of there being no image upon which to fix this fantasy makes this piece both witty and thoughtful, an effective play with the sinister and the expected.

Also sinister was Sarah Lundy’s Personnel Apocalypse, video of a flapping moth trapped in a cylindrical prison that was lit from behind. The allusion in the title to bureaucracy and its sense of futile action and dehumanising constraint made sense in the context of the site. But it is also an aesthetically compelling piece, the close image of the creature makes it look unworldly, an anxiety about the types of alien movement of insects contrasts to the fascination of being able to study its struggle against constraint. It is absorptive and lyrical, nicely contrasted by the droning sounds of the other exhibitions, and the pervasive laughter of Conway’s piece. By contrast, Restless by Stephen McGlynn is premised on the glance, denying the viewer the chance to engage with it at length by the use of a strobe light that aggressively flickers on a sign reading ‘Restless’. The font of the sign, a satisfying cursive that is reminiscent of 1950s sweet shops, implies a sort of homeliness and welcome that is denied by the flickering light. That the whole thing is contained in a separate room, with a smaller-than-door sized opening through which to look in, means that the viewer is kept outside this experience; attacked by it, but not a part of it.

Richard Forrest and Dan Guiney’s Sculpture comes with the by-now-ubiquitous headphones that play a soundtrack of raw and textured noises. As an aside, one of the nicest things about this exhibition, something that it is admittedly well suited to, is that most of the works are not accompanied by headphones. Instead the noises intermingle and build to create a varied and layered soundscape that brings the show together. It is also somewhat to the detriment of the purely audio works, Dave Fyan’s Climbing the Peacock’s Tail, Robin Parmar’s Apophenic Ecosystem C10 C30, and to a lesser extent Erin Gee’s Voice of an Echo, which mixes visuals and sound. These contribute greatly to the overall noise of the exhibition, but the details get a bit lost in the melee, meaning the specificities of these pieces are hard to talk about. Returning to Sculpture, the headphones in this piece add to its experience. The asymmetrical diamond shaped construction looms large over the rest of the works and changes the phenomenological relationship to the space. This piece encourages the viewer to move around it; it hangs from a chain, suspended, a bright light casts its shadow on the wall behind it and the sleek black gloss paint and silver bolts on its back – which confront the viewer as they enter the exhibition – contrasts with the deteriorated images of faces that are barely determinable in the darkness. The headphones that are attached to the top of the piece mean that the viewer has to be closer to the sculpture than is quite comfortable, we are forced into an intimacy with the piece that brings us into the space that it delineates for itself. Unlike Restless, Sculpture tries to trap us in, a punk aesthetic of shiny black, chains and bolts adds to this effect.

Dominic Thorpe’s Video is another of the sonic elements of the show, a deep and desperate breathing that brings an additional human sound into the electronic tones that underscore the exhibition. This video shows a male figure standing about a foot away from a theatrical spotlight, moving his head in a frantic motion from side to side. The light’s intense brightness means that his image is almost totally effaced when he looks straight into it, as he turns to the side we get a brief glimpse of his features, mainly visible through shadow, creating a stilted imagery reminiscent of looking into a zoetrope. When showing the close up, this is an affecting piece, trails of spit and sweat pour from his face and his exhaustion is palpable in both his failing action and his laboured breath. Less compelling is the shot that is taken from a distance, showing the blandness of the setting; the extension lead for the light and a sad looking radiator form part of the visual landscape. As my companion suggested this does imply a sense that everything sinks into bathos, but I felt that it went someway to undermine the energy, viscerality, and unsettling nature that was so engaging in the close up image.

The standard of works in this show, and their relationship with one another, makes it in its own right an excellent testament to the possibilities of galleries like Tactic, which is a welcome addition to the already thriving scene of small galleries in Cork. What is particularly outstanding about this exhibition, however, is the way that it resonates with the soundart scene, something now well established in the city, and ever growing in administrative and institutional recognition thanks to events like Just Listen, Strange Attractor, and others. The aesthetic of these works plays into an aesthetic of the soundart scene, particularly the Black Sun events. This was particularly noticeable when leaving Tactic to go to Gulp’d in the Triskel for coffee and seeing the various ephemera and documents relating to Black Sun which were curated by its organiser Vicky Langan. Though, to me, the theme of Uncanny Sound resonates more with sound than the uncanny, this is unimportant considering that it is adding to a scene and an aesthetic, based on punk and the best possible kind of angst, that are growing in popularity and recognition in Cork at the moment. That this exhibition was put on now shows a sensitivity and an attention to the artistic and social reverberations that are culturally and geographically specific, something that should be warmly welcomed.

July 5^th -7^th 2011

Review by Miranda Corcoran
Incorporating a broad array of visual and technical styles, the diverse collection of artworks assembled under the auspices of the Socio-Fi exhibition comprise a remarkable evisceration of the manner in which technology impinges upon our minds, bodies and lived experience, transforming our conception of reality and mediating our engagement with the world around
us. Drawing inspiration from the theoretical writings of prominent 20^th-century thinkers such as Baudrillard and McLuhan, the artworks collected within the Basement Project Space subtly interrogate the myriad ways in which our perception of social reality is determined by the modes of communication employed by our culture. In doing so, the various pieces which comprise the Socio-Fi experience reflect the corruption of reality by the insidious ubiquity of modern technological forms and media-generated images.
This vision of a technological simulacrum slowly encroaching upon the once inviolable veracity of everyday experience is, in my view, apotheosised by two works whose forms dominate the central floor space of the subterranean gallery. The first of these is a multimedia piece by Stephanie Hough. An engaging dialogue between the image and the actual, this piece consists of a sparse composition in which a fan rotates aimlessly; intermittently generating gusts of cool air which occasionally disrupt a rack of gently fluttering papers, while its pixelated image is relayed to a television screen standing just
metres away. However, despite its proximity to the actual composition, the centralised location of the television set invites us to view the rotating fan, not as a real object, but rather through the filter of the television screen. Thus, this nuanced piece draws the viewer into a complex meditation on the nature of a socio-cultural reality which, rather than being grounded in any kind of ontological veracity, is instead constructed through an endless proliferation of media-generated images. Subtly reflecting Hough’s preoccupation with the role played by the media in defining the nature of our engagement with the world around us, Joan Healy’s intriguing contribution to the Socio-Fi exhibition expresses a fascination with the power of the media as communicative tool.

Comprised of a single chair sitting alone in front of a television set, both objects haphazardly encased in tinfoil – a gesture whose crude, almost childlike, rendering of the steel and silver aesthetic popularised in science fiction appears to parody the naivety of our utopian dreams of a technologically resplendent future, Healy’s composition represents an engaging deconstruction of the complex relationship between the technological medium and the message it conveys. Consisting simply of fingers dexterously texting on a mobile phone, the ostensibly mundane image which flickers repetitively across the screen assumes a greater significance when it becomes apparent that the letters and words which have been so hastily typed on the phone’s keypad are not simply random statements, but the lyrics to the Rage Against the Machine song “Killing in the Name Of”. However, as these words pass across the screen in silence, it becomes increasingly obvious that any vestige of anger or passion that may have been contained within in these lyrics has been muted and nullified. In this way, Healy interrogates the manner in which any radical sentiment embedded in these words is, through the process of their constant reproduction
and repeated visual transmission, gradually diluted and eventually divested of the power of their original meaning.

However, while this theme of technological reproduction as a corrosive force may dominate many of the pieces on display, the notion of the media as a largely negative influence is repeatedly called into question, as the artists represented thoroughly interrogate the complex nature of our relationship with the technologies that circumscribe our understanding of the world around us. Jonathan Mayhew’s work Render Repeat Okay is an understated piece made up of strategically placed strips of vinyl tape arranged in such a way as to spell out the slogan “Nothing is real till you copy it”. While the confrontational immediacy of the piece suggests a satiric criticism of a culture that has descended into the semiotic miasma of the hyperreal, Mayhew’s work also addresses an issue which ultimately lingers behind all of the works on display here: the possibility that it might in fact be the very process of copying and disseminating images and ideas that renders “real” even the most intangible of concepts. Eschewing the temptation to indulge in overt criticism of media culture, the works collected here force the viewer to consider whether the act of reproduction is simply a deindividuating process which effaces the aesthetic or conceptual essence of the subject being copied or if this process of reproduction and dissemination instead functions to provide the subjects copied with a more profound sense of presence or actuality. After all, as products of the media age, our perception of social reality and, indeed, our very selfhoods are circumscribed by continuous exposure to an endless cascade of media-generated images. Thus, Socio-Fi evokes the complex nature of our increasingly fraught relationship with the technological accoutrements that define the boundaries of our sensory and cultural experiences. In Seamus Bradley’s highly-original installation, for example, we are confronted with a multimedia kinetic sculpture in which a film projector, rather than issuing forth a diaphanous beam of light, instead produces a solid beam of silver material in which the moving image resides. In this piece, it is the art of projection that renders solid and tangible the image contained within the machine or on the strip of film. In transforming what should be an ethereal sliver of silver light into a solid image, Bradley’s piece seeks to remind us of the manner in which our perception of reality and perhaps even our individual identities are constructed via a myriad of endlessly replicated projected and pixelated images.

Further elucidating the complexity of our interactions with the multitudinous technological and media forms that surround and define us, Stephanie Hough also presents an intriguing series of ersatz advertisements for imaginary products whose structures and functions seem at once mundane and fantastic. This display of imagined consumer goods includes an “Eye-phone”, a device which claims the power to conjure up the transcendent beauty of the synaesthetic experience, and an “I-Wave” which promises to construct “playlists pre-defined by careful market research” thereby “removing the need for tiresome decisions”. In constructing these quasi-whimsical products and their accompanying advertisements, Hough not only subtly recalls Baudrillard’s maxim that the media creates a simulacral state of consumer desire by blurring the line between goods that are needed and a need that is created by the media, she also delineates the means through which our experience of the world is defined by manifold technological forms. Perhaps, one of the most intriguing facets of Hough’s work is her use of parodic adverts to accompany her satirical commercial products. Humorously subversive in tone, the language used in these advertisements displays a number of clear parallels with the unabashed optimism of mid-twentieth-century American advertising. As such, they are evocatively reminiscent of an era in which the rapid acceleration of technological progress appeared to signal the imminence of a technocratic utopia. In emulating this buoyantly optimistic rhetoric, Hough’s satirical adverts recall the hopeful enthusiasm of an epoch in which the much-anticipated birth of a seemingly-imminent utopian future was seen to be inextricably linked with scientific advancement and the desire to accrue technologically sophisticated household appliances and consumer goods. Drawing on a similar theme, Adam Gibney’s unique sound-based installation offers a fascinating insight into the myriad ways in which technological forms intrude upon our experience of ostensibly objective reality. Composed of a series of four domestic blenders, each one placed in an opposite corner of a rectangular space and filled with a different brightly coloured liquid, Gibney has synchronised each blender to switch on when the recorded voice which emanates from the radio standing at the centre of the arrangement intermittently calls out a colour corresponding to the hue of the liquid it contains. In co-ordinating the actions of the blenders to seemingly react to the commands issued by the disembodied voice emanating from the radio, Gibney’s unique installation poses a series of intriguing questions regarding the nature of a society whose understanding of reality has become increasingly dependent upon technology.

Dexterously interweaving multimedia installation and experimental artistic forms, the diverse collection of artworks which make up the Socio-Fi exhibition offer an engaging dialogue on the manner in which our experience of so-called objective reality is forever mediated by the technological media through which we perceive our socio-cultural environment. As such, Socio-Fi constitutes a fascinating exploration of contemporary culture’s descent into the hyperreal which questions the efficacy of our ability to interact with the world around us and perceive our socio-cultural reality as anything other than a media-generated verisimilitude.

Review by Leslie Allen

hOurs is a response by the committe for the third year Crawford student show to the hours of planning, organization and construction that went into the production of an exhibition in the imposing unfinished space of the Elysian tower. The cavernous concrete space was elegantly transformed into a functional gallery space by the hard work of the third year students, yet still retaining the brutal industrial feel of an unused shell that is the white elephant of the Elysian.

Eight artists came together to produce installations, drawings, prints and sculptures that reflected their interaction and stuggle with the gallery space. A few pieces were recognizable from the third year show, such as Elliot Rainey’s Retro Gression. A room constructed from unfinished wooden panels, the centre contains a stool for the viewer to sit on, facing in either direction are two long vertical mirrors, which are angled in such a way as to encompass only the reflection of the structure behind, and to completely eclipse any trace of your own image. A simple visual trick, it is a disconcerting play on our expectations of mirrors as instruments of doubling. Instead of an infinite multiplication of your reflection, a human presence can only be glimpsed when approaching the centre from the side, once seated in a direct line between the mirrors your bodily presence vanishes. Mirrors become a tool of vanishing- reawakening the delight and astonishment that clear reflections produced with the invention of reflective glass- but here inverted to produce and opposite effect.

Fiona Creagh and Emily O’Flynn also chose to contain their work within discrete separate areas within the larger space. Each artist uses the gentle glow of a lamp to illuminate the dark corners of their individual spaces. Creagh’s layered monoprints of city scenes in evocative sunset hues make use of the low lighting and enclosed nature of the space to enhance the reception of her themes, of small square windows to the city. The plastic layers placed about a centimeter in front of the coloured prints, or surrounding the prints on four sides to create a three dimensional box, create the feeling of distance from the hazy views of city buildings and window lights, as if viewed from a distance, through double glazed glass at sunset. This intimacy of the enclosed space is also made use of by O’Flynn, who presents a series of black sketches in charcoal on cotton, the expressionist marks conjuring up half formed faces that bleed into the fabric texture of the cotton ground. The hazy light of the solitary lamp here creates a world of shadows that add dimension to the black and white images.

Other artists chose to interact more directly with the internal structure of the building. Maeve Lynch’s piece New Growth is perhaps the most successful intervention into the concrete space. Continuing her theme of hair growth, small tufts of merino wool protrude from cracks and cavities on the walls surface, interjecting an organic element into the dead man-made forms of the room. It is as if the unfinished concrete had suddenly begun to sprout a layer of fur to cover its cold greyness. I would have liked to see Lynch continue this growth around more surfaces of the space, rather than confining it to her own area of display.

The left-over plinths, number stickers and nails in walls that marked the remnants of the Ground Floor exhibition in June provided a unifying feature, connecting the disparate works which were for the most part confined to their own individual areas of the space. While this made evident the differences in approaches and concerns of the individual artists it also made the central theme a little difficult to grasp. Works as conceptually diverse as Rory Mullen’s Cart After Christy Brown and Fergus Dowd’s Untitled stacks of fruit, still in their supermarket packaging, placed on white plinths had little to unite them except perhaps a certain wry humour towards the hours of manual labour and consumption of food that must have gone in to the organization and production of a large collective show.

In all, hOurs demonstrates the diversity of personal responses that emerges out of an interaction with a space. The Elysian provides a presence of its own that complements the work of the artists. The show’s greatest strength is the subtlety and variety of artistic reactions to both physical environment and conceptual premise.

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION: Terry Blake & Nevan La Hart @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

18.00: Socio-Fi @ Basement Project Space Launch (exhibition)

Tuesday 5th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION  @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

12.00 -17.00: Socio-Fi @Basement Project Space (exhibition)

20.00: Foma and Fontanelles launch upstairs @ The Phoenix Bar (poetry)

Wednesday 6th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION  @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

12.00 -17.00: Socio-Fi @Basement Project Space (exhibition)

Thursday 7th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

12.00 -17.00: Socio-Fi @Basement Project Space (exhibition)

Friday 8th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

19.00 – 22.00:’The Thin Line Between Documentary and Film’, Art in the Making @ The Guesthouse (film / discussion / food)

Saturday 9th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

14.00 – 16.00: Strange Attractor @ The Crawford Art Gallery (sound / performance)

18.00 – 21.00: ‘The Thin Line Between Documentary and Film’, Art in the Making @ The Guesthouse (film / discussion / food)

21.00 – late: Black Sun 2nd Anniversary @ Gulp’d / Plug’d (film / sound)

Sunday 10th July

15.00: Sunday Lunch and Concert @ The Guesthouse (music / food)

20.30: Vicky Langan and Max Le Cain film programme @ The Guesthouse (film)

Monday 11th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

19.00: Three Medium Length Films by Rouzbeh Rashidi @ The Guesthouse (film)

Tuesday 12th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

09.00 – 18.00 – Innovation in Irish Poetry Conference @ Room 212, O’Rahilly Building, UCC (poetry, education)

21.00 – 23.30: Unlistenable Music Night @ An Realt Dearg (music)

Wednesday 13th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

19.00 – 21.30: Soundeye tribute to Patrick Galvin @ triskel (poetry)

Thursday 14th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

12.00 – 17.00: hOurs @ Ground Floor Gallery, Elysian (exhibition)

12 – 13.30: SoundEye: Lloyd / Joyce / Tuma @ Triskel (poetry)

15.00 – 16.30: SoundEye: Loose / James / Sweeney @ Triskel (poetry)

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

20.00 – late: Black sun at SoundEye @ Triskel (tickets  €5 – available from www.triskelartcentre.ie 021 4272022) (sound, poetry, performance)

Friday 15th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

12.00 – 17.00: hOurs @ Ground Floor Gallery, Elysian (exhibition)

12 -13.30: SoundEye: Morris / Walton / Willey @ Triskel (poetry)

15.00 -16.30: SoundEye: Cheek / Healy / Mac Cormack @ Triskel (poetry)

20.00 – late: SoundEye: Cous Cous Programmed Open Mic night @ Cork County Cricket Club (poetry)

Saturday 16th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

12.00 – 17.00: hOurs @ Ground Floor Gallery, Elysian (exhibition)

12.00 – 13.30: SoundEye: Pattison / Walton / Warriner @ Triskel (poetry)

15.00 – 16.30: SoundEye: Cummins / Katko / Weiss @ Triskel (poetry)

20.00 – 21.30: SoundEye: Manson / McCaffery / Notley @ Triskel (poetry)

Sunday 17th July

12.00 – 17.00: hOurs @ Ground Floor Gallery, Elysian (exhibition)

12.00 -13.30: SoundEye: Gaynor / McCarthy / Squires @ Triskel (poetry)

Monday 18th July

12.00 – 20.00 A 2 BIT PART-TIME AMATEUR PRODUCTION @ Black Mariah (exhibition)

12.00 – 17.00: hOurs exhibition @ Ground Floor Gallery, Elysian (exhibition)

13.00: Danny McCarthy Soundwalk start @ The National Sculpture Factory (sound)

A Title In A Haystack will seek to clarify and synthesise the ambivalence of a conceptual nuance in committing to the physical activity of creative processes. A Title In A Haystack will address its own relevance, redundancy and reluctance to shape anything of any real significance.

They have been collaborating for seventeen years. Their previous work followed an interest in national identity, bad television and a blank canvas.

New poetry magazine Fontanelles and Foma will launch upstairs at the Phoenix Bar on Tuesday 5th July at 8pm.

Screening of three films by Rouzbeh Rashidi at the Guesthouse on Monday 11th July. See www.rouzbehrashidi.com and http://www.theguesthouse.ie/ for more details.