ReviewedTeenage Kicks, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, until March 14th (01-6612558)Salla Tykkä: Cave, Meeting House Square, Dublin, February 19th, 24th and 26th, 8 p.m.-11 p.m. (01-6772255)Darren Murray: Pursuit Of Pleasure, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until February 28th (01-8740064)
Are teenagers a US idea? A great deal of the work in Teenage Kicks is American in fact and feeling. The show's subtitle is Adolescence As Subject, and Ruth Carroll, its curator, has picked up on the growing number of artists who, perhaps in search of new subcultures to explore, have zeroed in on teenagers. Her exhibition features work by 10 of them, all making lens-based work. The explanatory notes refer to "that special stage of life that precariously hovers between childhood and adulthood".
Teenagers have a lot on their plates: exceptional peer and other pressures, the renegotiation of their positions within their families, sexuality, striking a balance between autonomy and alienation, contradictory feelings of power and powerlessness. All par for the course. There's also the discovery of a strange inner world of imagination - and, as it happens, Cave, the Finnish artist Salla Tykkä's short film trilogy, dovetails with the RHA show. Tykkä's films treat stages in the developing, subjective self-awareness of a young female protagonist, visualised in terms of striking and enigmatic moments of revelation.
Her perspective, and hence that of the viewer, is very much from the inside out. Although she refers to the conventions of cinematic narrative, including the western, the psychological thriller and science fiction, none of the three episodes makes sense in any conventional narrative sense. Yet there is an emotional logic with which we can instinctively identify.
In the work of the artists at the RHA we are mostly on the outside looking in or at. Not in the case of Anthony Goicolea's playful video, with its elements of fairy tale and dance, as a group of boys plunge into a lake in a vivid evocation of freedom. And although Justine Kirkland's beautifully composed, classically poised landscapes, with their dreamy female subjects, are very much out there, situated somewhere between Poussin and the Pre-Raphaelites, they do imply compelling inner worlds.
Lauren Greenfield's brash reportage images plunge us into a subculture of intensely image-conscious, consumerist, high-maintenance, competitive and sometimes prematurely soured teenage girls. The photographs have a gritty, authentic air, and they don't make affluence look like fun. The dust-caked young guys in Janine Gordon's atmospheric mosh-pit snaps are having fun, transported by music and movement, revelling in their animality. There is an anthropological quality to this documentation of rites, as there is with Paul Smith's endless round of tequila shots.
The bland callousness of the sexual bravado of the teenagers in Julika Rudelius's voyeuristic Train is not quite undone by the growing implications of its falseness. Brian Finke's studied portraits of cheerleaders and footballers depict them as chilly, even eerie embodiments of American icons.
In the way they emulate and define stereotypes, they lead on to Ruth McHugh's studies of a girl confidently shaping herself to an ideal image. Bob Negryn's Isabelle, as formalised and substantial as an aristocratic portrait by Sargent, is admirably self-contained and self-assured. So too are the teenagers in their rooms photographed by Edward Barber: inner worlds assertively projected onto the outside; transitional spaces. Lest we protest, teenagers have their own input in the form of a collage of photographs displayed anonymously. It's not the strongest element of the show, but then they didn't have the production values bestowed on other participants.
Most of what's on view is excerpted from larger projects and series. Catalogues are available if you want to contextualise what you see on the walls. But what you see amounts to something coherent and engrossing in itself, given that it's a modest round-up with no startling departures. It draws us in, doesn't crowd us out, is informative and doesn't patronise. It probably won't tell teenagers anything they don't already know, American or not, but it is still worth their while seeing it - and yours, even if you're not one.
Darren Murray's Pursuit Of Pleasure takes up from where his last solo show, Constructed For Leisure, left off. Murray makes highly stylised paintings that, given their slender means, boast surprisingly numerous references - to landscape, to advertising, to abstraction, to interior design, to botanical illustration, to painting by numbers.
His elliptical compositions hybridise modes of representation, from botanically exact renderings of "exotic" flowers to stylised foliage, pieces of "random" poured pigment that insinuate themselves into a representational function, to spare linear tracings of spectacular pictorial subjects. The titles lead us to the idea of the exotic, with plants as metaphor, and to conventional realms of natural beauty that happen to be places - Yosemite, Chamonix and Mont Blanc - largely supplanted by representations and their roles as resorts.
All these elements exist within vivid, almost uncomfortably strident fields of garish red and blue, Barnett Newman-like, although the pared-down illustrative style of Patrick Caulfield comes more to mind in terms of the results: layers of artifice that advertise themselves, a self-consciously narrow emotional register, a mode of picture-making that is highly strung and hedged by limitations. Perhaps there is a nostalgia for the real, yet in terms of art and of life it's not a brave new world but one we made earlier.
