Metal Bridge is not quite a group show, instead grouping the four exhibiting artists into two pairs. The first of Sorcha Dallas’s two spaces belongs to Steven Claydon and Craig Mulholland.
Claydon’s Locked Constellation (Giant) is a curious assembly of objects. A small, spiky and vaguely architectural geometric cage of copper tubing squats protectively over a black disc, and beside it lies a cyborg of a spiral shell, half of it, impossibly, made of metal. Leaning against the wall behind these two sculptures is a perspex vitrine, backed with hessian, displaying a cut-out rasterised image of a statue, either praying or deep in thought, that has been haphazardly stuffed into its enclosure. There is something about these pieces that suggests Claydon is playing a future historian and archaeologist, presenting artefacts from our recent past and the coming times.
Craig Mulholland’s installation is similarly subtle and suggestive.
Paths of Resistance is a spiky mixed media installation consisting of three tripods. The first bears a crudely-fashioned silver globe, the second an approximation of an oil painter’s mahl stick, the linen bound up with strands of solder, while the third displays a framed work. Together, they form a sort of solar system of artistic production. This theme is reflected in Reduction With Noise, a sound piece that matches strings and electronica with an operatic refrain, repeating the phrase “What is art itself?”.
On the walls, Mulholland presents a series of “paintings” - titled Broken Pain and numbered one to four - which are fashioned from aluminium, polycarbonate and thread. The scores and cuts in the metal surfaces call to mind shattered glass and pyramids viewed from above, some are anarchic, peppered with holes. Together, they might be read as a reduction and reappraisal of Vorticism or Cubo-Futurism, co-opting the dynamism of those movements, but bringing them to a sudden halt, rendering a fascination with the machine age, literally, in metal.
It is good to see Mulholland constrained by a small gallery space. His last exhibition at Sorcha Dallas, Plastic Casino, was sited not in the gallery but in a disused sewing factory, which Mulholland filled to the brim with a vast installation containing painting, sculpture and video work, all resting on a dizzying array of art-historical references and shot through with political concerns.
In the next room, the splitting of the exhibition is made explicit not only by a change of space, but by an opaque white curtain covering the window and blocking the entrance. Behind it lies a striking sculpture by Thomas Helbig, Gesicht. An oversized bird, or perhaps a dinosaur, peeps out from a half-cracked egg, its face set in a rictus of struggle. It might be taken for a fossil, or a particularly violent piece of taxidermy, were it not for the explicit application of white paint on its black surface - Helbig wants us to know that he created this still-born chimera. After the shock of Gesicht, Helbig offers a moment of calm in the form of two works on paper. Both untitled, these crayon daubs are incomplete, unsatisfying, with smudges of dull colour and half-finished lines. They might fare better elsewhere, but following Claydon and Mulholland, and facing Helbig’s own sculpture, they are underwhelming.
Duncan Marquiss’s looped video piece is, on the other hand, overwhelming. Still images of abandoned buildings or caves struggle with brief shots of a white-hot furnace, while blurred shadows of human figures first dance, then fight. The piece closes with a descent into pure strobing colour, so aggressive that it becomes impossible to watch. Marquiss’s other work, No Volunteers Came Forward, a drawing in pencil and chalk, sees two half-clothed female figures, one blindfolded, caught in an exhausted embrace.
In both works, Marquiss offers an imagined mythology - the film a creation myth, the drawing a scene from some invented epic - and it is this that ties his work together with Helbig’s, with both artists conjuring up a past that never happened.
Similarly, back in the first gallery, Claydon and Mulholland chronicle skewed histories, this time political and art-historical, twisting real world antecedents to their own ends.
The Metal Bridge of the show’s title, then, is not just a reference to shared materials, but to a shared sensibility rooted in the examination of the past, real or invented. A neat curatorial trick, that, and one that not only casts a new gloss on the work shown, but forms a strong whole from the work of four very different artists.
This review was first published in The Herald on January 19th, 2007.