Visual art: A strange palace
The final show at Sean Treacy estates is a fitting swansong for Pallas Heights Studios, says Donald Mahoney
Review: Pallas Heights Group Show
Sean Treacy House, Buckingham Street, Dublin 1. Saturdays 1-5pm or by appointment on 087 9677394. www.pallasstudios.org. Until 15 May
Silence is the most abiding feature of Pallas Heights Studios these days. Organisers Brian Duggan and Mark Cullen knew that when Dublin City Council allowed them to convert a floor of flats into studio and gallery space, the allocation was temporary, but for an organisation looking to provide affordable studio space and an alternative to the gallery system, the estate's ruin was laden with possibility.
The last show in the history of Pallas Heights is showing now until mid-May, and features four shows in four former flats. It is, among other things, a fitting swansong to the building, the forgotten history of its residents, and its brief second life as an arts space.
Sally Timmons, presenting with the Dublin-based art group Via, has blocked the southerly-looking windows in her second floor space, save a small hole, in order to transform the former bedroom into a camera obscura. Best seen when the sun is out, her piece rewards patience. By the time one's eyes adapt to the dark, the viewer has been subsumed into the estate's curious quiet. Throughout the show, Timmons will be attempting to capture the projected scenes by drawing the scenes to the walls with pastels.
On the ground floor of her space, Vanessa O'Reilly has also obstructed her southside window with a wall of stacked cement blocks. Looping sounds from an unknown source behind the wall adds menace to the piece. Upstairs, she has spelled the word swarm backwards in Christmas lights. Only when looking outside at the adjacent apartment block, or down at the strewn chaos of the courtyard does the word appear properly, reflected in the glass.
The space Clodagh Emoe uses for her piece 'Metaphysical Longing' is the most visibly deteriorated, with water stains on the wall that could double as abstract painting. The connection is appropriate, as the artist evokes the "failure of the modernist vision of utopia" in her artist statement. The effect of Emoe's piece, for all its intellectual underpinnings, is immediate, as a large photograph of a magisterial oak tree hangs on a wall in a room whose disrepair is nearly beautiful.
Unexpected that a drawing would be the most haunting piece in the show, but Fergus Byrne's cluster of a hundred or so wide-open eyes, drawn directly onto a white wall, is full of unease. While the piece turns the voyeuristic dimension of art appreciation back on the viewer, it also inevitably seems to document the experience of making art at Pallas Heights. Not only were artists greeted with suspicious looks when they first entered the space, but the rooms are filled with a tangible sense of its residents' past lives. While large families must have found the flats claustrophobic to inhabit, artists have found the space an ideal place to work. The studios receive remarkable daytime light and the silence can feel so complete that in the heart of north inner-city Dublin, the city itself feels strangely removed.
The last show at Pallas Heights is not only an elegy to the standing history of the estates, but proof of art's power to transform, however temporarily.