reviews clarke & mcdevitt
Clarke & MCDevitt
Present: exPeCt nothing
Gallery for one, dublin
23 novem ber – 18 January
Gallery for One offers a unique set of conditions for artists and curators. spilled McDonald’s shake long enough for a dedication to be made. Tait,
Accessed through a small boutique, it is the size of a tall cubicle, about of course, specialises in hybrid portraiture, but here the twists and slippages
five feet square and eight feet tall, opening above to an illuminated recess. reveal the rarity of a genuinely unexpected encounter.
A group show here would seem folly, but by chance and design Clarke Conversely, Richard Hughes’s conspiratorial Let’s Not and Say We
& McDevitt (Declan and Paul, respectively) have pulled it off, and have Did pretends to signal an encounter that never took place. But to rue a torn
even stretched the space by showing more in it. This is achieved through an poster would be to fall for an elegant white lie that blinds one to what is right
attention to scale that has less to do with size than with the careful weighting before one’s eyes. Nothing is missing or missed: there is just a wall upon
of each gesture and the strength of its appeal or withdrawal. Not cramped which nothing is inscribed but its own luminous blankness. Such conjuring
by the expectations of a particular thematic, the riddle that is each gesture far surpasses the economy of its means. As does Sara MacKillop’s Cassette
further bemuses one who, upon entering a space that suggests privacy and Case, where again a reversal is made, with a redundant casing approaching,
provision, is already surprised to find that there is nothing to hand. as record of a technological moment, its own former ‘inside’. Such a gesture
One might reach first for Siobhán Hapaska’s Head Wind (all works sends the familiar hurtling towards a horizon that the open case itself
2007), a toilet roll and holder upon which is written a brief eulogy to the describes.
acceptance of things as they are. Such throwaway sentiments cannot be Above, arranged side by side along two walls of the ceiling recess,
disposed of here, and the reversal that withdraws an appeal as it is given is is Anna Barriball’s Found Drawings (Dublin): 14 scraps of paper bearing
left to hang there, playing out its own inoperativity. accumulations of thoughtless scribbles scavenged from stationery-shop
Put somewhat at a loss, one begins to turn, whereupon one pen racks. This arrangement of test pieces transforms incidental anonymity
encounters Nathaniel Mellors’s The Father’s Soliloquy (Giantbum), a into an unruly baroque surface, setting up a modest but magnetic di sotto in
bum-head windily unfurling flag-bound slogans; the farts, it seems, of sù. The more daring might exit via the ceiling. Tim Stott
an insolent patriarch chewing on the world’s indigestible inhabitants.
Something dreadful might yet return from this ranting, blindly ridiculous
lump to drown out more discreet discharges… such as Neal Tait’s distressed
milkshake portrait of Paul McDevitt, Untitled (Milkshake). Perhaps a gift in
thanks, perhaps a retort, the makeshift twists of a straw stop the flow of a neal tait, Untitled (Milkshake), 2007
artreview 168
march_REVIEWS.indd 168 5/2/08 14:02:45
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