Stephanie McBride draws parallels between recent photography and new works on video by Anthony Haughey to be shown at Limerick City Gallery of Art
Derek Mahon’s poem ‘A disused shed in County Wexford’ constructs a daring conceit: it re-imagines a settlement of mushrooms as messengers on behalf of lost people. The empty shed, a leftover from a burnt-out ‘big house’, evokes Ireland’s past, yet is firmly located within its present – in this case Ireland in 1972, at the height of the Troubles. The poem addresses two types of photography: only the ghost of a scream At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with…. You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary, The former suggests the blast of the media gaze, the latter the more leisurely but no less intense tourist gaze. Eschewing both kinds of scopic intrusions, Anthony Haughey’s ‘Settlement’, a series of photographs depicting ghost estates, is, like Mahon’s lines, located in a specific historical moment. These images, of half-built houses littering landscapes on the edge of town, document the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger era Yet Haughey’s lens prompts a deeper and more reflective gaze as he ‘frames the scene of a crime’. Shot on film, using extremely long shutter speeds in the liminal light between dusk and dawn, the images avoid the gloss of ‘property porn’ yet assume an eerie and curious beauty of their own. Haughey’s aesthetics challenge easy notions of idealized landscape, and foreground the disruption to the land by unfettered development and zoning. Several images have a sense of stealth, the lens at a remove as it takes in the disturbance of clay and earth, the discarded heaps of builder’s rubble in a tension between nature and man-made grit. Despite the absence of people, it underlines how human and political agency acts on the landscape. His images recast this emptiness as an emblem of the economics of excess and emigration.
The new Lexicon is a worthy member of Dublin’s distinguished group of public libraires, writes James Howley in his appraisal of the controversial new building.
It is the implication of something beyond a simple landscape that makes Martin Gale’s art so compelling, writes Alison FitzGerald as his exhibition continues at Taylor Galleries, Dublin