WORDS Gabija Purlytė
Project Arts Centre was the summer’s discovery for me. Housed in an enviable spot on East Essex Street, Temple Bar, this multidisciplinary arts centre regularly hosts compact but high quality contemporary art exhibitions. The current group show, Whitewashing the Moon, takes its title and theme from an 1869 short story by Edward Everett Hale, ‘The Brick Moon’. Published as a single edition for the occasion, the work is available for visitors to leaf through in the gallery, and can also be freely read online.
What is so appealing about this exhibition, as with previous ones in PAC, is how strongly it is held together by the multiple conceptual and aesthetic threads which run through it, so that the show becomes more than just the sum of its parts. The twilit setting here not only brings out the qualities which are often subordinate to colour and form in the visual arts – luminosity, reflectance, warmness, sound, smell – but also adds to the science-fiction feel of the show.
One of the main ideas within the exhibition is the defamiliarisation of objects; the potential for materials and forms to become strange and acquire new functions and meanings when appropriated for an artwork. Another is the human desire to understand the world by organizing it into conceptual systems. For example, Caroline Achaintre’s ceramic pieces are inevitably interpreted as anthropomorphic masks; the sculptor Jean (Hans) Arp even insisted on calling his sculptures ‘human concretions’ because of this universal tendency to see human features in abstract forms. Visually, certain geometric shapes recur among the works, most notably the Rhombicuboctahedron – the shape of both the ‘Brick Moon’ in Hale’s story and the National Library of Belarus in Raphaël Zarka’s film.
Eleanor Duffin’s Tephra is one of the works I would like to single out as particularly interesting. This set of five modular sculptures is the first known attempt to cast obsidian (collected at volcanoes by the Irish artist herself!). My hands-down favourite, however, is From Them But Not Of Them, an installation by Barbara Knezevic, in which a huge slab of yellow beeswax is kept at interior temperature of a beehive, slowly changing in appearance over the course of the exhibition and emitting a heavenly smell. If you have not yet been to Project Arts Centre, look for a blue building with a chaotic mass of black bitumen-coated struts sprawling out of its balcony and over the façade – a major new installation/performance by Ruth Lyons, The Forgotten Works. The exhibition runs until 27 October 2012.
