WORDS Gabija Purlytė
A “mashed-up, smashed-up, post-decorative dissolution of illusion” — the curators’ own words are a brilliantly succinct and accurate summary of the current show at the LAB Gallery. The opportunity to organise this exhibition was the prize offered to the recipients of Dublin City Council’s Emerging Curator Award 2013/14. The winners were RGKSKSRG — the curatorial pair of Rachael Gilbourne and Kate Strain — and Tonight, you can call me Trish is the first major manifestation of their practice.
“This is a landscape for dreamers”, says the introduction of the exhibition booklet; it is an invitation to the realm of multiple realities, fantasy and virtual worlds. It is also a heightened and intensified reflection of our everyday lived experience in the global West, where the virtual and the real are becoming inextricably intertwined, the blurring border constantly fading. All of this is done with a good dose of fun, in the best spirit of entertainment.
There are no labels or layout schemes; visitors are left to figure out for themselves where one artist’s work ends and another’s begins in the scenographic staging devised by Eilis McDonald and Mark Durkan. An impressive range of media are assembled here, from sculpture, to video, to sound installation. The latter is Alan Butler’s U+25B6, a combination of the Nyan Cat meme tune and a death metal version of YouTube’s Terms of Service agreement. Bursting out at intervals to eclipse all else, it pulls viewers out of the engagement they may have had with other works, in an insolent subversion of art gallery conventions. On the other hand, this violent intervention brilliantly enhances the already surreal impression of the gallery’s display, working symbiotically with Brenna Murphy’s folk-art inspired sculptures which seem to be pulled out of a computer game environment.
Oliver Laric’s video, on first impression, is a collection of completely random, if mesmerising, snippets of reality in slow motion. The catch? This footage, shot on two of the world’s most expensive cameras, is now freely available online as open source material. Considering the value of such labels as “rarely exhibited” and “exclusive opportunity” in the advertising of art shows, the reintroduction of this material into a gallery raises up the contradictions between the democratic appeal of public availability and the commercial value of limited access. Do you feel cheated to be shown something you could watch anytime on your laptop?
Pilvi Takala’s Real Snow White records the artist’s attempt to enter Disneyland in a Snow White costume — an attempt aborted by security guards who kindly explain that she might be confused with the “real” Snow White inside the park (with good reason too, given those few dozen autographs Takala gets to sign for children before being escorted away). The real Snow White, mind you, does not eat or drink or go to the toilet, so an overly human-like imposter would probably do irreparable damage to her reputation.
The fantasy worlds created by adults for children are also explored in all of their psychedelic morbidity in Rachael Maclean’s film Over the Rainbow. As in most of her works, Maclean enacts all of the roles herself and appropriates found recordings to make up the sound track. She employs elaborate makeup, costumes and green-screen computer post-production technology to transport us, this time, to a reality of My Little Pony colours, where fairy-tale motifs meet video-game narratives, MTV aesthetics and horror movie logic. Brimming with ironic cultural allusions in exemplary postmodernist fashion, this is one irresistible hallucinatory trip for adults only.
Tonight, you can call me Trish is a truly impressive debut for this young curatorial duet. While each of the selected works is interesting on its own, this exhibition overall is more than the sum of its parts. Immediately engaging, it takes some time to get your head around it, and lingers on for a while after leaving the gallery. Prepare to be disturbed in the best possible way.
The exhibition continues until 22 March at the LAB Gallery, Foley Street. Admission free
