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Falke Pisano
THE SHOWROOM
63 Penfold Street
May 1–June 15
Falke Pisano, Structure for Repetition (not Representation), 2011-13, wood, fabric, collage, blackboards, chalk, dimensions variable.
Falke Pisano’s solo debut in the United Kingdom takes up the mercurial nature of the mental condition, providing an unsettling representation of the mind. Consider 5 Black Boards, 2011-2013, an ongoing project that consists of six chalkboards featuring drawings by the artist. Each time Pisano presents this work, she brushes away her previous work and creates a new one. That said, dusty remnants of past chalk sketches conspicuously haunt the background—a wink at the process of erasure itself. Here, the artist presents drawings relating to her research on the human body as well as imagery based on medical history. Together, the boards recall the dawn of rational humanism during the Renaissance and the advent of modern medicine in the late eighteenth century. The inherently temporary nature of her project evokes mental flux and instability, while the history of medicine hovers like a specter, at once ephemeral and formidable.
See also two videos, Composition and Disorder of Composition, both part of the series “Disordered Bodies Fractured Minds (Private M., Patient A. & Traveller H.),” 2012, which feature the voice of a person—a male in one, Pisano in the other—recounting stories taken from various texts and reports of mental and physical breakdowns following trauma, mental illness, and substance abuse. In both videos, the monologues run over a disjointed series of images, creating a visual and audible stream of consciousness, musing on the state of the speakers’ self-professed insanity.
An overwhelming presence in the exhibition is the main installation, Structure for Repetition (not Representation), 2011–, for which the artist has hung black curtains throughout the space. It dominates the gallery like a diabolic labyrinth, with dark fabric looming ominously above the other smaller works. In the same way that history both supports and haunts Pisano’s work, the installation simultaneously forms a shadow over these smaller pieces and provides them with their architecture. The structure’s placement next to the Showroom’s large wall-length windows leaves it vulnerable to the changing elements, a backdrop for pathetic fallacy.
— Ashitha Nagesh
Cleary & Connolly
CASINO MARINO
Cherrymount Crescent, off the Malahide Road
March 24–October 31
Cleary & Connolly, The Iso-Symmetroscope, 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.
William Chambers’s Casino at Marino is a tiny puzzle box of a building, full of architectural tricks and illusions. Built in the 1750s, it is the most important neoclassical building in Ireland, and yet Chambers, also architect of London’s Somerset House, never saw it—he never even visited Ireland. Despite this, his genius haunts the site, providing the subject for Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly’s installation The Absent Architect, 2013.
Formally trained in architecture, Cleary & Connolly explore the spatial dynamics of perception through their practice. Their earlier works include Pourquoi pas toi (Why Not You), 2009, which was exhibited at the Centre Pompidou and used real-time computer modeling to project visitors into the screened works. The Absent Architect develops this idea differently and takes it further. In one of the three elements, the columnar The Iso-Symmetroscope, situated in the entrance hall, contains a series of mirrors that reflect unexpected vistas, heightening the existing optical manipulations in the architectural space created by Chambers, which include windows that are different sizes inside than they are from the exterior, a door that is larger in appearance than in actuality, spaces that lead nowhere, and a false door.
The Temporal Symmetroscope, another element of the installation, envisions a dramatic reimagination of Chambers himself within the Casino discussing plans with his patron, the Earl of Charlemont. The scene fades, however, when one stands immediately before the monitor, the anachronism replaced by a projection of the viewer. Briefly, the audience and the imagined ghosts of the building intersect. This provokes a sense of the layering of time, and thus explores how the resonances of various lives are held and congealed within historic buildings such as the Casino.
— Gemma Tipton
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