Visual Arts: ReviewedThe Silver Bridge Jaki Irvine, Irish Museum of Modern Art until April 17 (01-6129900);More Often Than Most, Brian Duggan, Pallas Heights until Jan 15 Thur-Sat by appointment, 087-9677394/ (087-9572232)
Jaki Irvine's The Silver Bridge is a sprawling installation, a composite of eight related looped videos projected simultaneously. It's not the first time she's done something on such a scale. Her remarkable Douglas Hyde Galley show The Hottest Sun, the Darkest Hour featured five individual looped film sequences simultaneously projected throughout the gallery's cavernous space. The clackety-clack of the 16mm projectors added to the atmosphere, but apparently keeping them all going was a huge technical effort and at Imma she uses the newer technology of video with DVD projectors.
In between these two shows, she curated Somewhere Near Vada, a film and video fest held in the remodelled Project building before it was fully open. The experience of visiting the show, wandering through darkened rooms encountering an impressively broad range of film and video pieces, is not unakin to The Silver Bridge, in that neither offers one unifying viewpoint.
The latter is installed in several darkened rooms and corridor spaces of the West Wing, and you can wander back and forth between them, sampling the disparate sequences and, perhaps, pondering the relationships between them, which are not particularly obvious.
The work had a long genesis. It was originally mooted in 1999 when it was a short-listed proposal for the Nissan Public Art Project. Irvine's idea was to make a series of short video pieces, with reference to Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly, looking at the state of being an exile and the problems encountered by those who try to come home. It was proposed that the videos be screened in public venues including the Natural History Museum and the Phoenix Park.
In the event, things have turned around somewhat, and much of what we see in Imma was actually filmed in both those locations. Irvine's source is narrowed down to one of the stories in Le Fanu's book, the novella Carmilla, which has been described as the first lesbian love story in English literature.
Carmilla is about a vampire, and vampires are famously restless and rootless, condemned to wander indefinitely. We gradually learn that the title character has been in just such a state for centuries, since her family was ruined and their castle destroyed. The heroine, Laura, falls in love with this "playful, languid, beautiful girl", eventually learning Carmilla's predatory intentions and true identity, witnessing her destruction and, of course, restoring the moral order.
Rather than making anything like an adaptation of Le Fanu's story, Irvine picks up on aspects of its mood, themes and imagery.
In the past she has made fragmentary open-ended narratives, but here each section of the installation hinges on a single, disconnected image or sequence: birds massing in fading light, bats suspended or stirring in the Dublin Zoo, deer in the Phoenix Park where a solitary man lingers restlessly while a young woman loiters pensively in the Natural History Museum.
What might be described as the two central pieces feature the bridge of the title. In one, we look along the skeletal bridge as a figure, stretched horizontally, tries vainly to reach what looks like a castle door on the far side. In the other, two figures, echoing the bats, engage in an elaborate, acrobatic pas de deux, clinging to each other while suspended precariously from the bridge.
Most of these scenes are witnessed in murky half-light or outright darkness. In addition, the images are enlarged to the point of dissolution, so that detail is blurred and it's difficult to be sure what we are looking at.
Such moody ambiguity is characteristic of Irvine's work. Two sequences are relatively clear and brightly lit, those featuring the man in the middle distance in the park, and the woman in the museum whose face almost fills the frame for a prolonged, searching close-up - the latter a virtual Irvine trademark at this stage.
Carmilla can return neither to the home that has been physically destroyed nor to the spiritual "home" of her family. Yet there are indications, in Le Fanu's descriptions of her involvement with Laura, that their passion for each other has a real, romantic basis and that their pairing is not simply that of predator and prey.
In other words, could we read Carmilla's vampirism as representative of her search for love? Might it be that such a glimpsed, thwarted connection is an even more desirable destination than home in either sense of the term?
Previously, Irvine has referred to the concept of home as habitude, a dulled, deadened routine whereby feelings and awareness are blunted.
Her isolated figures, desired and desiring, alienated from nature (symbolically situated as they are in museum and park), and from their own natures, might be at home in that way. Her physically interlinked figures are suspended precariously above the void, unsure of each other and yet, we might infer, their state of uncertainty is preferable.
Brian Duggan's More Often than Most, the latest tenant in Pallas Heights in Buckingham Street, features a group of videos projected or screened on monitors.
Each is a record of a specific performance event, sometimes substantially edited, so that what we see is quite cryptic. For example, 36 Seconds (71 Jumps) records 71 jumps from the rocks on the top of Three Rock Mountain.
Duggan was wearing a camera strapped to his head, but we see only the time he spent in the air on each jump, so that it's a jagged, dizzying, disorientating few moments.
Duggan himself features in each piece: negotiating the stairways of four flats in Sean Treacy House on his hands; trying to walk along a rope suspended between tree trunks; jumping on a trampoline to the point of destruction.
Up to a point, this recalls the distinct, often gruelling strand of performance art that depends on endurance. Yet there is something else going on in Duggan's work as well. He has devised a screen persona that refers equally to clowning in a Chaplinesque, Buster Keatonish way.
Several of his pieces are more puns than performances per se, as in Door, which plays with our perceptions of the working of gravity.
His doomed attempts to walk along the rope are basically slapstick. In devising exercises entailing repetitive labour, futility and sometimes outright failure, he invites us to think about everyday struggles and travails.
