No man's land

Billy Leahy is inspired by an exhibition at the Project whose central theme is the very lack of one

W hen a bright, friendly email pops into your Inbox inviting you to a new exhibition in the Project entitled La La Land it is hard to turn down such an opportunity.

For the show, the Project procured the services of London-based curator, artist and writer Paul O'Neill asking him to assemble a motley crew of international contemporary artists to create an experimental exhibition that holds no central theme and is filled with contradiction. O'Neill's curatorial work is known for examining manners of interpretation and the desires that lead to this interpretation, so what better man to design an exhibition that aims to directly advocate a lack of cohesion and turn our normal expectations of an exhibition on its head.

One of the main underlying elements of La La Land is the selection of works that, although situated in a gallery setting, break down that boundary by referencing an elsewhere. Ronan McCrea's 'Appropriate Measures II', for instance, is a building site hording, which has been plastered over with a selection of Jaime Gili's fly-posters citing historical and peripheral art movements that uneasily juxtapose a fictional Utopia with reality.

This physical and metaphorical 'elsewhere' is again seen in David Blamey's 'Celestial Notice Boards' which is a wall-mounted cloth-covered corkboard with carefully placed tacking pins that look like a map of the night sky. Kathrin Böhm's loosely collaged motifs and forms decorate the ceiling, producing a spatial transformation that sits uneasily alongside the more defined formality of Lothar Götz's wall mural, of which more later.

The floor of the gallery belongs to Liam Gillick, whose work 'Discussion Island Preparation Zone' involved mopping the ground with a mixture of water, vodka and glitter, to import a subtle low-rent glamour to the gallery. The most striking piece in the exhibition, however, is Götz's hard-edged, geometric wall painting, which contains a bright colour-coding system developed directly as a response to the gallery's physical qualities. The pastels and bold colours beam down from two walls from the corner of the room, that works in a similar manner to a 3-D painting, drawing us in and out of the apex of the space almost as if we were within the painting itself.

Again it becomes apparent that taken individually, each piece has its own logic, but only if viewed as part of the whole does this aspect become accentuated and more apparent. La La Land as a unified exhibition is schizophrenic, with each work enjoying a tense and uneasy relationship with the next. O'Neill has brought together works that when interacting in the same space act as foils, rather than complimentary elements for each other. And this is where the ultimate success of the show lies – the differences from one piece to the next highlight elements of the works that may have otherwise been overlooked.

? More La La Land at the Project Arts Centre, Temple Bar until 2 July

Admission Free. www.project.ie