Declan Long

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  print November 2022

  Jesse Jones

  Two tall screens in a large dark gallery displayed black-and-white footage of nine young women standing shoulder to shoulder. The setting is a nonspecific interior; light is low; no details ground the characters in identifiable time and space. Dressed in matching patterned smocks, the women might be freely assembled members of an obscure sisterly community or confined inhabitants of an institution. Either way, they have come together in this moment as a choir: performing, perhaps protesting, making themselves heard as one. The drifting camera pans across their side-by-side faces in close-up;

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  print October 2022

  Claire Barclay

  An unexpected aftereffect of wandering through “Thrum”—Scottish sculptor Claire Barclay’s substantial exhibition this past spring—was a lingering low-level sense of dread. Barclay’s art is mostly abstract and elliptical: mysterious but not menacing. Her post-Minimalist forms, realized as sprawling installations or self-contained tableaux, are always stern and sensual, playing intelligently on tensions between austere sculptural frameworks and decorative or expressive features. Barclay pieces together hardy, high-quality industrial materials—steel frames, timber beams, machined brass fittings—

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  picks June 14, 2022

  Lauren Gault

  Barking ravens, wolf-howling humans, speech-mimicking passerines: Lauren Gault’s “Galalith” comes with a backing track of unreliable animal sounds. The squawks and cries are impersonations and strange combinations: beast- and birdcalls, human and nonhuman voices, variously merged. This fitful creature-chorus is an apt accompaniment to the hybrid forms of Glasgow-based Gault’s mercurial sculptures. From a distance, each of the three main (and untitled) works here seems a wholly different aesthetic species. One, suspended from the ceiling, is a self-contained, figurative presence: a white,

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  print Summer 2022

  Aileen Murphy

  The leaping dog at the center of Aileen Murphy’s mentality-yatter, 2021—like many of this Berlin-based Irish painter’s subjects—is an exuberantly confusing presence. Murphy’s outsize pooch busily commands the more than six-foot-high canvas, while barely registering as a coherent form. Scruffy, smeary strokes of sharp white, salmon pink, honey yellow, and midnight blue congregate loosely as a canine figure, a dog body without fixed physical contours: Scribbled black eyes peer out from an aggregation of energetic gestural marks. More unstable still is the peculiar hurly-burly of the animal’s

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  print January 2022

  Anne Tallentire

  Bright lines of yellow builders’ string, rolls of primary-colored packing tape, flat-head screws tagged with tiny strips of pastel-toned paper: Anne Tallentire’s sculptural materials can be both rudimentary—practical nonprecious items, often associated with different stages of an architectural process, from preliminary drawing to actual on-site construction—and, in their unorthodox configurations, tidily decorative. Her artworks involve careful measuring, precise mapping, methodical assembly; she reflects on the physical, social, and sensory conditions of built environments, scrutinizing small

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  print Summer 2021

  Lawrence Weiner

  Thirty-seven years ago, a succinct text work by Lawrence Weiner was stenciled onto an external wall of the old Guinness Brewery in Dublin. Two blocks of pale-blue, sans serif lettering—one in English, one in Irish—were applied to the dark, weathered brickwork of an imposing historical edifice. Elliptical couplets declared a nonconforming Conceptual artist’s complex interest in material solidity: STONE UPON STONE / UPON FALLEN STONE. Commissioned for the 1984 edition of the quadrennial Rosc exhibition—the title of the seminal series of international group shows staged in Ireland between 1967 and

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  print April 2021

  Yuri Pattison

  A slate-gray sea flecked with scattered embers of evening light. Beyond, shrouding the horizon, the hot-pink haze of a crazy lurid sunset. At this unique passing moment in the trippy real-time drift of Yuri Pattison’s mesmeric digital simulation sun_set pro_vision, 2020–21—an ever-changing ocean scene on five separate screens, vividly rendered with game-engine software—the balance of solemn sea and showy sky seemed just about believable. Despite the gaudy extravagance of the setting sun’s display, the sequence recalled familiar real-life skyscapes and resembled, in its radiant extremity, the

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  picks October 02, 2020

  Katie Holten

  Katie Holten’s Irish Tree Alphabet (A-Z), 2020, is based on an agreeable, legible conceit: matching each letter of the ABCs with the silhouette of a specific tree. Read her twenty-six original pictograms and they become a new language, or at least a new way of using it, in which every letter is an evocation of dendrological diversity. A is a lanky Scots pine; B is a scrawny birch, C is a squat hazel; all the way to Z, these neatly-trimmed tree-glyphs are as individual and graphically nuanced as the Latin characters they replace.

  The New York-based, Irish-born Holten has created versions of this

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  print July/August 2020

  Mairead O’hEocha

  Mairead O’hEocha’s most recent paintings are strangely vibrant studies of dead creatures—brightly hued depictions of taxidermied beasts and birds at once gorgeous and ghoulish. Her subjects are the stuffed, posed, and lifeless occupants of antique display cabinets in Dublin’s natural-history museum, a Victorian-era institution that is itself, in its impeccably preserved, nineteenth-century style, frozen in time: a museum of a museum. Dubliners call it, with morbid affection, the Dead Zoo.

  Such a setting—a place where natural forms are arrested and arrayed, fixed and framed for leisurely

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  print December 2019

  Dorothy Cross

  Three solemn sculptures made from carved marble and, in one case, collected stones, made three weighty statements on the fragility of earthly existence. This sternly minimal exhibition by Dorothy Cross—titled, with alliterative delicacy, “I dreamt I dwelt”—was a potent distillation of the Irish artist’s long-standing themes and recurring tropes and a powerfully mournful meditation on the dividing lines between human and animal, land and sea, life and death. Cross has been dreaming and dwelling along these boundaries since the 1980s, imagining, through the refined grotesquerie of her multifaceted

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  print November 2019

  CLOSE-UP: NAKED EYE

  TOWARD THE END OF HIS LIFE—with little time and energy left—Derek Jarman returned to painting in a spirit of vigorous, vehement urgency. Cinema had long been the celebrated center of Jarman’s art. From the mid-1970s to the early ’90s, he was, arguably, Britain’s most venturesome big-screen poet: a cultivated, risk-taking pioneer of punk and queer film. But painting had also been important to Jarman since he was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in the ’60s, fitfully recurring as an artistic compulsion in conjunction with the collaborative pressures of filmmaking and the

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  print Summer 2019

  Jessie Homer French

  Fires burn, fish swim, people die: Again and again, the art of Jessie Homer French returns to elemental facts of earthly existence. Mostly, her bittersweet, anti-pastoral paintings depict—and artfully distort—scenes of everyday life and death, culture and nature, in the landscapes close to her home in the hilly outskirts of La Quinta, California. Born in New York in 1940, Homer French has been a Golden State resident for much of the past four decades. During this time, she has cultivated a delicately cartoonish, self-taught painting style that responds to the bracing proximity of wilderness—the