#deirdre breen

August 2021 was wen I first came across this site-specific artwork presented as part of the Mardyke 300 celebrations. I revisited in May 2022. The photographs from August 2021 were reprocessed using DX0 NIK 5 Collection.

Image 1 from the HALFTONE website

Image 2: Eclipse, Deirdre Breen, screenprint. Also from HALFTONE website.

Links to artists discussed:

http://2016.halftone.ie/prints/deirdre-breen

http://2016.halftone.ie/prints/ciaran-eaton

http://2016.halftone.ie/prints/eamonn-doyle

http://2016.halftone.ie/prints/jordan-mcquaid

http://2016.halftone.ie/prints/omin

http://2016.halftone.ie/prints/shane-lynam

http://2016.halftone.ie/prints/myles-shelly

http://2016.halftone.ie/prints/rafal-krol

http://2016.halftone.ie/prints/helen-gallagher

http://2016.halftone.ie/prints/helene-pertl 

HALFTONE print fair @ the Library Project, Dublin.

The HALFTONE print fair opened in the Library Project, Temple Bar, Dublin on Thursday the 24th of November. The Library Project is an exhibition space consisting of a large, street-facing area with a window-display and a small exhibition space adjoined at the back of the main area. These tight spaces are always at full capacity on opening night of an exhibition in the busy Templebar street, and last Thursday night was no exception.  Where The Library Project has little floor space, the gallery has unusually tall walls which are often utilised for group exhibitions like HALFTONE. As such, shows in the Library Project often employ the “salon-style hang” to display artworks (image 1 above). Because there were almost 60 artists on display for the print fair, I’m going to talk about some works that caught my attention.

My personal top pick from the exhibition is Deirdre Breen’s Eclipse, a small two-tone screenprint (image 2 above). It was hung very high on the wall, but its strong colours and clear lines allowed its details to remain visible. Eclipse has few visual elements, abstractly depicting two forms in only two colours. In spite of this, one can spend time puzzling how Breen created the beautiful illusion of two abstract forms merging. To motivate such rapt investigation into the size, spacing and colour of stylised, simplified geometric shapes shows Breen’s skill and restraint. The forms which represent astronomical bodies seem to be woven together, subverting our understanding of an eclipse, in which one celestial object passes in front of another. This unique portrayal of a visually beautiful natural event allows Breen to explore innovative methods of depiction. For her, it seems, the chaos of nature can be reduced to geometry and mathematics, and so Eclipse is as much a Venn diagram as it is a portrayal of an astronomical event.

A side-effect of the salon-style hang employed by the HALFTONE fair is that the viewer may mistakenly correlate disparate artworks. I, for example, mistook Untitled from End, by Eamonn Doyle, and Advance by Ciaran Eaton as being by the same artist. Both works are architectural photographs showing a concern for strong geometric lines and shapes. They even share a blue and grey colour pallet.

One would also be forgiven for mixing up Jordan McQuaid’s screenprints and Omin’s ink print entitled P3 Davd’s 15010101, as both incorporate classical sculpture into a 2-dimensional medium.

Urban landscapes devoid of people but populated with lonely streetlights is another visual theme that I spotted a few times, the most memorable for me being Myles Shelly’s Shelly Banks. Clearly, the melancholy imagery of our urban spaces without us in them is of concern to contemporary artists, perhaps alluding to disillusionment with impersonal cities and our alienation from nature.

The overlapping themes and visual signifiers revealed by HALFTONE’s fair may evidence similar concerns of the various contemporary artists working in printed media. HALFTONE thus acts like a snapshot of the moment; the exhibition displayed the abundant outcomes that are possible from all forms of print and revealed some similar general themes in the contemporary movement.

           That said, Shane Lynam’s Inner Field II was not like anything else on display in The Library Project last Thursday. This may be because Lynam had no starting point for researching a new project in 2012, and he ended up creating unintended patterns in Dublin city. Although Lynam seems to avoid recognisable landmarks in his photography, I would guess that Inner Field II depicts the IFI cinema. The theatricality of this idiosyncratic cinematic institute is highlighted in Lynam’s focus on the massive red curtain which covers the wall in the cinema. The unusual shape and colour of the theatre seats is revealed to us, possibly by the flash of the camera, making the usually recognisable cinema alien to us. Finally, the miniscule amount of information given to us by the image of the top of the man’s head is bursting with personality. Why is he sitting huddled in the corner against that immense curtain in what appears to be an empty cinema? The photograph is an eccentric portrait in a strange place that only an insider with no project brief would shoot.

           Photography had a strong presence at HALFTONE. Another example (which I didn’t see in person due to the chaos of opening night) is Rafal Krol’s El Nido; a subdued exercise in tone which we usually see in etchings more than in photography. Krol works mostly in black & white, which puts him at a disadvantage in a salon-style exhibition like HALFTONE. When the works are hung almost floor-to-ceiling, one will struggle to see or remember quiet, meditative works like El Nido, especially when they are exhibited alongside more colourful, subversive or pop-art style pieces. For example, I have no trouble remembering Helen Gallagher’s Havin’ the Craicen; a luminous, graphic illustration depicting a fun subject in a confident style. It is unfortunate that it is simply the nature of the salon-style hang to make bold and colourful art more memorable for the viewer than more subtle, monochrome works.

           This is why I will finish with some small, black & white etchings by Helene Pertl. Islands We Can See From Clogher is an unpretentious piece in which the medium truly reflects its subject matter; just as the four islands sit in a grey sea, the four small etchings are positioned on a large white sheet of paper. Like Deirdre Breen’s wonderful work with which I opened this review, Islands… has few visual elements, but those elements have been selected rigorously and offer much material for a viewer to engage with. Islands We Can See From Clogher shows us that in an abundant exhibition such as the HALFTONE fair, it pays to give as much attention to the quiet little artworks as to the big bold ones.

           I have only discussed a fraction of the printed works on display in the Library Project, due in part to the fact that I simply couldn’t engage with and remember all of the pieces. As previously stated, I missed some works on opening night that I later appreciated (having looked them up on HALFTONE’s website) perhaps because of their restraint, visual simplicity and subtlety. Similarly, I can clearly remember some works which I found loud, simplistic and uninteresting to me, which I have not written about. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the prolific print fair, which raises questions about the meaning, connotations and consequences of the salon-style hanging used by the Library Project.

I will analyse these concerns regarding the salon-type exhibition (with reference to the HALFTONE print fair) in my next post.