This year's Open EV+A exhibition in Limerick is less spread out, but still weaves nicely into the fabric of the city, writes Aidan Dunne
On the evidence of this year's Open EV+A, curator Dan Cameron runs a tight ship. From the mid-1990s, EV+A broke the bonds that tied it to a few centralised venues and found its way into the wider fabric of the city, finding a berth in shops, bars and churches, pavements and car parks. The legacy of that trend endures, but in a more limited, contained way, which is good news for visitors to the exhibition, because when it was most widely dispersed, even tracking down its constituent pieces became a Herculean task.
Given that the venues are as far from the city centre as the University's Bourn Vincent Gallery, some travel is involved, and you will still have to do a certain amount of map-reading, particularly if you want to take in Regina Corcoran's tour of Limerick's Alternative Gardens, a thoughtful inventory of accidental wild gardens that prompts reflections on nature and culture, chaos and order, life and death. In a flat in Cathedral Place, meanwhile, Nancy Hwang literally plays Host to visitors. The idea of viewing social space and interaction as art has gained considerable currency in the last few years, but sociability has always been EV+A's strong suit. If you can't get to the exhibition, it may come to you, in the form of Patrick Killoran and Willie O'Brien's taxi.
Somehow St Mary's Cathedral has become a regular venue, and a rather spectacular one. It's generally brought out the best in artists whose work is sited there. On a mound adjacent to the cathedral's burial plot, American sculptor Jason Middlebrook has installed a monumental, 3-D version of Robert Indiana's iconic typographic painting Love as a dilapidated memorial, crumbling and sprouting weeds, a work that needs no elaboration. Inside the building, Susan MacWilliam's latest exploration of the uncanny and the paranormal, a recreation of experiments designed to test a Russian girl's apparent ability to "see" despite physical obstacles to her vision, is perfectly located.
The vast bulk of the show, though, is concentrated in three buildings just minutes apart, the smallest being the Belltable Arts Centre. As ever, EV+A's centre of gravity is in the Limerick City Gallery, and the gallery's character as an outstanding conventional exhibition space makes a fine contrast with the Old County Council offices on O'Connell St, a terrace of linked, beautiful buildings still decked out in their blandly functional municipal livery of carpet and plasterboard partitions. This atmospheric, disused space makes an ideal home for a series of photographic and installation-based works.
American sculptor Chris Sauter engages ingeniously with the building's layers of history, fashioning the likeness of an ornate dining table (cut through by a plough) from the surrounding plasterboard panels. Mark Cullen has re-tailored his Cosmic Annihilator, playing with the viewers' sense of scale. Eamon O'Kane's portable studio, approximating in size to a shipping container, its walls lined with finished pieces and works in progress, seems to have materialised by magic, a room within a room. It is eerily effective and could well be titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Studio.
Although the basic principle of Open EV+A is that artists submit work or proposals and take their chance as to whether the curator will go for it, there is a certain discretionary element as well; a curator might signal to artists that maybe they'd be interested in submitting something. Cameron indicates why this may be necessary (see panel). Nevertheless, it's clear that Irish artists acquit themselves well with work that is presumably entirely unsolicited.
Whether prompted or unprompted, it's good to see a smart video piece by Guy Hundere, all about going fast and getting nowhere as the view in the middle distance seen in transit remains mysteriously static. Ignasi Abali's playfully trompe l'oeil lists are also clever. Tonico Lemos Auad and Janet Mullarney both prove that you don't need to work big to get noticed. Auad's wall pieces, composed of gemstones applied directly to the wall, are beautiful and invite reflection on art and monetary or other value. The diminutive scale of Mullarney's animal figures augments the tenderness of their mood. Bea McMahon works several layers of comment and meaning into her documentation of last year's dispute at Dunsink in Dublin. Martin Shannon's Taint, on a billboard on Bridge St, offers a witty, subtle take on the negative stereotyping of Limerick city.
This year's Young EV+A comprises several good, innovative projects, including On Loan . . . from our house, a project in which local children nominated objects from their own homes to go on loan to the Hunt Museum, where they are displayed among items of the permanent collection. Postcards relate the personal significance of the objects in each case. The Banshee Lives in the Handball Alley is a DVD in which pupils from three Limerick City Schools retell local stories. Michael Fortune, Aileen Lambert and Maurice Gunning are the artist-filmmaker-photographers involved.
One of the overall highlights is Dennis Connelly and Anne Cleary's RVB, virtually a show within a show at the City Gallery. It's an ambitious three-screen video installation interweaving three thematic narratives, all based on documentary material recorded in or around the artists' Parisian home over a three-year period. The three stories, all absorbing in their different ways, relate to the birth and infancy of the couple's twin girls, Bo and Lotti, the disappearance of one of a pair of Japanese nightingales, Igor and Vera, and, rather horribly, the circumstances surrounding the killing of Claire Koskas in the furniture shop run by herself and her husband Rene on the ground floor of Connelly and Cleary's building.
The coexistence of the three documentary strands generates a compound narrative texture that is much more than the sum of the parts, interesting though each is in its own right. RVB conveys a sense of urban life in a rounded, novelistic way, economically conveying the open-ended intersection and progress of different forms and levels of experience. There is nothing showy or portentous about the way it deals with the profound themes of birth, life, love, loss and death; it just sets about its task with quiet effectiveness and insight. Not the least of its virtues is that it explores and highlights the shifting, porous boundary between our personal and public worlds, incidentally pointing out how personal responsibility merges with civic responsibility.
• Open EV+A 2005 is at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, 061 310633, and other venues. Exhibition guides with maps are available at the City Gallery and elsewhere
