An Lanntair, Stornoway, until 30 April 2007

Exploded View by Joe Mahony.

REMEMBER the shimmering 3D pictures you found in special corn-flakes packets if you buried deep? You held the small plastic images up so the light hit them at different angles. Then they came alive.

Well, imagine three of these, but as large rectangles, spaced together so they relate but don’t interfere. They are photographs which move. Shapes on slopes are human interventions in an awesome landscape. As the youth of Stornoway would say, pretty random, man.

But Joe Mahony’s random interventions, which could be as simple as repetitions of the shape of a blown-out umbrella, are carefully planned. Nothing is left behind in the windblasted west side of this particular Island.

This is a man with a lifelong love affair with lenses. So the still or moving images are trusted. They communicate Joe’s results to the An Lanntair audience which has not witnessed one crazy Irish Aussie install his umbrellas in a glen in a gale.

So you enter Stornoway’s art centre which presents very fine opportunities to show visual art thoughout the building and not just in the large L-shaped gallery.

Joe’s shimmering photos are spaced beside a wall left white. The restrained hanging emphasizes a parallel with Japanese prints. So does a contemporary suggestion of calligraphy spaced at the sides – perhaps the Ordnance Survey grid reference of the locations. These are like resonant titles but in numbers.

When you enter the gallery, the work becomes fully 3-dimensional. I think he’s used his wide range of digital image techniques to make sculpture. The blown out red brollies are composed on a black laquered rack on the long part of the L.

They are still now, but two projections, on facing walls, show what happened. The elements are allowed. A splash of rain on the lens is left – so you get the feeling this man was engaged in a battle, a campaign with no time for fuss. The strength of the wind has risen beyond the ability of the hairy mic to dull it down fully.

The shapes of mangled red are completely abstract against a setting greyed by the Atlantic front. You become lost in it, looking from time to time from screen to screen. Sometimes it appears that they are in synch. Not for long.

The shots are held for a long time but new angles enter. Once this temporary installation has been set up (in a location on Great Bernera) the artist is lost in the act of observation. It takes clinical precision to achieve a work like this. In fact, the result is exactly as the artist described it would be when he planned the installation and the recording and presentation of it.

Except that the wind and rain have had their effect. That can’t be controlled, only noted. The elements are the main players in this drama. It’s an opera of the landscape. You see no suggestion of the human figure, except that an umbrella, even a wind-tangled one, hints of the human. But it’s as if you are on the set of a Kurosawa movie.

The exhibition is one result of a Partners project. Joe Mahony has had a year-long residency with An Lanntair, linked to the Grianan Centre. In the past few weeks, his work with the clients at Grianan has been shown.

Again the show was a fine use of the space, alternating comic-book posters with video and sound recordings. Individual voices came through loud and clear. For me it was a more interesting and humane presentation than the huge slick Gilbert and George works presently on show at the Tate Modern.

Fair play, though, that the artist who has enabled other people to express themselves so well now presents his own vision. The imagery and sound is in one way specific, but in another timeless and placeless.

It would be good to see the process of new work originated in these Islands being exported to suitable galleries. Stornoway used to be a world ranking trading port for herring. Joe Mahony’s work can cross any local or national boundaries even though it could never be compressed into a barrel.

© Ian Stephen, 2007

Links

• An Lanntair