Staged concurrently at five different venues—separated by significant distances over a sizable countywide area—Niamh O’Malley’s multipart exhibition for the inaugural Mayo Arts Collaborative was a dispersed retrospective, a strategically decentered survey. This project was partially born of straitened funding circumstances in Ireland: an imaginative resource-sharing attempt by several regional arts centers to experiment with a locally untested model of joint presentation. But by programming their exhibition in a manner that encouraged venue-to-venue travel across subtly varying rural terrains, the project organizers also showed considerable imagination in so sensitively siting the work of an artist acutely preoccupied with the representation of present-day landscapes.

O’Malley’s landscape videos are contemplative and melancholy but not romantic. In many cases, her subjects are locations to which she has no special attachment, or that speak of overt, cultivated artificiality. They are places not of presumed belonging or authentic being, but of temporary habitation or industrial transformation. Her landscapes are mostly marginal and, in one way or another, altered by humans. In the gracefully restrained black-and-white video projection Island, 2010—a looping, approximately eight-minute work shown at the Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar—the gliding camera circles a site of religious pilgrimage, an island in the middle of Lough Derg, a lake in County Donegal. Surveying the weather-beaten harbor of the desolate island in silence (it is worth noting the estranging absence of any ambient sound in these works), O’Malley seems keen to maintain a skeptical distance. The camera keeps drifting, never really coming to rest, never properly establishing a stable point of connection with this hallowed place. Other video pieces of similar length devote comparable detached scrutiny to diversely resonant spaces. Bridge, 2009 (screened more than twenty miles north at Ballina Arts Centre), aims to apprehend the epic scale of the suspension bridge over the Humber in northeast England from the perspective of a solitary observer at the shoreline below. Instead, however, the tonal contrast of the monochrome recording forces the bridge into darkness, rendering it as blacked-out “negative” space against the brighter sky beyond. Quarry, 2011, concentrates on the broken surfaces and chaotic, accidental “architecture” of an industrially ravaged limestone landscape. Presented another hour’s drive west from Ballina in the remote coastal town of Belmullet—where there have been long-running disputes about the Irish government’s management of offshore gas reserves—this work had particular, incidental relevance to its exhibition setting. As a reflection on the human relation to natural resources, however, Quarry is a typically nondidactic, inconclusive document—a hypnotic and entropic study of simultaneous construction and destruction in the landscape.

Projected video may be O’Malley’s preferred artistic territory, but the artist is also prone to shift mediums. What is sustained throughout this movement is a heightened, self-referential sense of visual constraint. Each video incorporates careful editorial interruptions: Screens or filters, for example, are intermittently placed in front of the camera, impeding a “clear” view. Her many drawings (ten of which, along with a sculpture, featured in an intricate arrangement at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, thirty miles northeast of Belmullet) come with custom frames and painted or rippled glazing that variously obscures and alters images in the process of displaying them. Recent sculptural works—such as Window, 2013, and Screen, 2011, at Custom House Studio, Westport—are tall, minimal structures on low platforms, composed of marked, tinted, or patchily mirrored glass panes. These mostly see-through sculptures propose layered and fragmentary views of the surrounding space. As in all of O’Malley’s work, they are assertively framed—and the world that is fleetingly visible within them is always under construction, ever incomplete.

—Declan Long