Feeling of Knowing, The Complex, 16th – 28th October 2021

 Exhibition Response, Deborah Madden

This is an exhibition of surface, space, and feelings.

The Complex is a former banana ripening warehouse. The space has enormous presence within the show, seeping out like the ethylene from ripening bananas, it imposes itself upon the work, and dictates what's possible within it. Everything happens inside its bare concrete, steel and wooden bones, unadulterated save one and a half white walls on the bottom corner. 

Dennis McNulty’s piece, Perceptron, (how can I be sure?), 2021, immediately confronts you as you enter the space. A tall, red, shiny skin floats over black plastic surface, diffusing the slim, rectangular lights algorithmically flashing on and off, an unknowable code. It is monumental – vast and reflective, it throws you back at yourself as you enter the show, the coded flashing a siren luring you in through its glossy, remote surface. Small portals in the back of the work allow you to see under the sleek, shiny skin at the binary blinking. The curling orange flex powering the work drops down from the ceiling behind. Two very careful and deliberate peeks ‘behind the scenes’.

 The space forces this.

Aleana Egan’s soft, hessian toned painting, ordinary language, 2020-21, sits beneath two similarly sized concrete squares plastered onto the wall, a natural relationship forming between the three. The canvas itself taking centre stage within the work, as the space itself does in Feeling of Knowing. Surface is inescapable.

The space eats the work.

Áine McBride’s sleek, shiny, magnetic marble apple arrangement for four, 2021 holds the transcripts of the adverts.ie conversations, bids and meetings that led to the acquisition of the bowls in the work. Made of flatpack furniture panels tightly and very particularly arranged on the ground in readily configurable forms, the bowls are held in a semi-concealed, semi-revealed tension. A kind of uncanny valley happens within it. The kitschy, flowery, highly coloured bowls familiar to any grandparent’s house sit awkwardly but securely within this wrong-shaped flatpack furniture chipboard. A marble apple sits on a metal girder across from the ground arrangement. You glide across on top of it, pulled in but not quite comfortable around its slightly odd shapes. You feel like you have the measure of it, rolling around the four structures, the cool, juicy smoothness of the apple, but the partially revealed and concealed bowls, the invisible (magnetic) force holding the cold apple and the sympathetically awkward forms made by the boards attract and repel you in equal measure.

Aleana Egan’s the nights are still there, 2017, sits behind McNulty’s Perceptron (how can I be sure?). Almost hidden, lit only at the top, it perhaps echoes the space more than any other work in the show. Tall, rusty curved pipes reach up towards the naked timbers of the ceiling like trees stretching for light. The very particular lighting on the curve at the top of the pipes gives the piece a poignancy, the rust too. The same colour as the metal girder McBride’s apple holds onto, it is perhaps the uncanniest of the works. In the same tones as the space, as with her painting, but sharing material, it wants to be a part of the space. Its subtle forms wind it in, it sinks into the rough, raw architecture of the space, absorbed by the building until you notice the small teal parts, or look up. The soft curves bring a sudden end to its utilitarian materiality, making it incongruous, and give it a quiet, but strong presence.

O’Sullivan’s piece, Transmission Belt, 2021 sits on the wall facing into the space. It’s made from galvanised steel cables used with a hydraulic baler that crushes waste material into squares. It rises from two small metal holders on the wall, precariously tensioned with bubble wrap inside them, drawing lines on the rough, unadulterated wall behind. A small paper printout of an image by O’Sullivan, Shutterstock, 2021, sits to its left. A view through the opening in a metal shutter, its tough, industrial subject matter is at odds with its slight, curling paper scale and materiality.  

Egan’s work, Returns, 2020-21, happens amongst the material solidity of the other works in the show. It is immediately recognisable as Egan’s work, with a taut familiarity. On one of the spaces’ only white walls, it sinks into it, almost swallowed but for its defiant precarity, shadowed by the lighting, wire, seaweed and delicately porous texture.

The work tries to escape the space.

This is a show in conversation, always, between the works, the space, the artists and the curators. It came about from curators Mark O’Gorman and Paul McGrane bringing the artists together, with no theme for the show, but a requirement to respond to the space.

A deep and abiding interdependence occurs. The benevolent power of the space to grant square footage to form is ever present. Like the ethylene from the ripening bananas, the space itself is a kind of solid gas happening in and around work, permeating everything, informing what can happen, dictating what possibilities can exist.

Conor O’Sullivan’s Tipping Scale, 2021, a mirror with small squares cut out in which sit scanner images, echoes McNulty’s Perceptron (how can I be sure?), in its reflective surface. The images in the small square cut outs are of barcode readers from supermarkets. Coupled with the mirror, always looking, it makes you a quantifiable thing, asking what you are, how much do you cost? Where in the system do you sit? Where do you scan? It is opposite to the space in every way – sharp and sleek. The work tries to escape the space, but the space is reflected back in its entirety. There is no escape.

It’s hard not to think of class when entering this space, with its naked transformation from utilitarian necessity to gallery. In the case of it being used to store bananas in particular; its colonial and associated class politics are unavoidable. What does the space think of what’s happening in it now? And what does it mean that it does? And how long can it continue to do so in the face of the unstoppable march towards hotels and co-living spaces happening in the city? Is the gallery’s existence a protest against the inexorable march of culture out of the city for the sake of capital? The space is aesthetically dictatorial, importantly so in my opinion, but welcoming towards the work that happens within it. Its unmade aesthetic rises in direct contrast to the work that happens within it and the position it occupies in the city and society as a whole from a class point of view. Is this the only method of survival for formerly working class or industrial space in Dublin now? To be ‘saved’ as an artist run space until it gets pushed out further and further to the margins of the city, or brought within the institutional art system?

These questions haunt the work, pulling you to the point of slippery, smooth immersion (O’Sullivan and McNulty’s mirrored works) then stopping you as soon as you slip into recognition with it. For example, in McBride’s arrangement of four the sharp, sleek edges of something quite quotidian, made anew, but not quite the final destination either, and the rough hewn edges of the space calling out the smooth boundaries of the work. The baskets are placed in a very particular tension within. The work happens very consciously and in a contained manner across the ground. Egan’s the nights are still there also provide an initially structural and tonal familiarity broken by the curved, purposelessness of its top.

The atmosphere of disassociated familiarity gives voice to the space, allowing it agency within the show. There is an overwhelming feeling of the emotional uncanny valley within the exhibition, the feeling of something comfortingly familiar but also wildly strange. The works act like a cypher, as a physical vehicle for something you know, something you have felt, can feel, but can’t quite place or articulate – the known unknown. Its recognisable vocabulary of skin and textures simultaneously provokes and soothes, as the work sits somewhat incongruously with each other, and the space. It all adds up to a feeling of comfortable unease.

This is an exhibition of surface, space and feelings.

Deborah Madden is a curator, writer and artist.