Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
How it was - Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston 26 January – 23 March
Retraces - Matt's Gallery, London 23 January – 17 March
Reviewed by: Jo Manby
Time was that art inspired feelings of devotion, pity, love, pride or patriotism. Willie Doherty's work, based on his intimate knowledge of his hometown Derry, unfurls for us the topography of quiet despair – one of uncertainty and division, fuelled by the bloody politics of Ireland's troubles.
Doherty's Preston show, 'How It Was', originally commissioned by Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, conflates the artificial and the natural into technically perfect art: but the images smart with hidden horrors. His shiny cibachromes, from 1994 to 1997, express something of the mucky mess of the manmade, inextricably mixed with nature's organic tangle. This sense of corruption also permeates Doherty's 'Retraces' at Matt's Gallery, a new seven-screen video installation exhibited alongside related photographs. Here, pieces of land or wasteland are tainted by implied evidence of tragic events – a mattress from a rusting car, with bullet holes in it, discarded number plate or windscreen fragment. These images are like a shorthand epic art, embracing the sorrows, not just of political troubles, but the personal history of small childhood places – a hawthorn branch of crimson berries, a particular patch of swaying bushes, a motorway section viewed from a footbridge above. To certain people these places could hold significance – but perhaps only to the artist and his closed-circuit eye. It will be a long time before nature manages to completely cover up these putative clues with its cleansing masses.
How It Was, the title piece at the centre of the Harris' top floor galleries, is a double-screen video installation. A man and a woman are recorded talking about a possible murder. Their voices, the substance of their narration, the jumpy edit, all lead to the making of a loose-fitting and unresolved story, charged with contradiction and tinged with a quiet acceptance of the inexplicable deeds of man. As viewers, we cannot tell what is going on any more than the characters in the video. As evidence it would not stand up in court. It has a documentary feel, like media reportage, but the protagonists seem like actors in a Crimewatch style reconstruction – voiced-over by the original witnesses. Titles of the black and white digital photographs on aluminium, also displayed at the Harris, underline the unregulated chaos and darkness that simmers just below the surface of life in Northern Ireland: I Was There and I Have Doubts; Small Acts of Deception; Unreported incident. As Lewis Biggs wrote during Doherty's Tate Gallery Liverpool retrospective of 1998, "His understanding of the political and psychological uses of the tools of documentary reportage imbue the works with enormous potency".
In 'Retraces' the viewer is faced by a bank of seven video monitors – like How It Was, looped and staggered. They occupy the back of the gallery while black and white photographs hang adjacently. The loops involve subtle, barely moving images – empty concrete yards, some just showing two angles of anonymous undergrowth or vegetation. Again there is the aesthetic of the natural and the manmade, held in painful, melancholy tension. Dawn rises on a pearl-grey lake, and car headlights appear through the mist.
Writer detail:
JO MANBY
is an artist, curator and writer.
Venue detail:
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