Bit of a run-around yesterday. Maria McKinney’s show at the Lab, Foley Street, Dublin – catch it if you can, it ends tomorrow, and she’s done some very interesting stuff with tables and jigsaws, shopping baskets and hair – then off to Drogheda. A mix-up in Swords meant we missed Amanda Coogan’s reading at the Highlanes Gallery, but did get a shot at the show itself. Marienbad Palace, curated by Jacqui McIntosh, engages the whole of the space, a converted church.
That fascinates me. The architects of the remodelling of the interior had clearly chosen a balance between concealing and revealing, allowing some of the original features to show, hiding others to make the gallery work. There’s a harmony to what they’ve created, forms intersecting to balance new and old.
Not so, though, two pieces in particular in Marienbad Palace. Laura Buckley’s contribution consists largely of a video projection onto a rotating mirror-faced cube. Rectangular, rhomboid, trapezoid, broken shapes get thrown all around, splintering the regularity of the darkened space.
In the main open area, Ian Monroe’s piece is a series of intersecting lines and planes in three dimensions, a sort of toying with its own forms while cutting a slight diagonal with the gallery space itself.
It’s this diagonal that has stuck with me, along with the more unpredictable angles of Buckley’s work. I’m wondering – and I’m sure others have pondered in a similar fashion – if a diagonal (of variable length, depending) is a symptom or metaphor for art. It’s this intervention that breaks the regularity, cuts both the physical and psychology space, to spark meaning out of geometry.
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