Sep 26, 2014
Rory Mahony’s exhibition, LOOP, is a concise collection of work featuring a three part video installation and a series of photographs. The exhibition has been installed in an intimate, dark corner of the Esplanade’s cavernous gallery. As you pass through the darkened abbreviated hallway you hear the exhibition before you see it.
The main focus is Thursday’s Child—a projected triptych, looped video installation. (Full disclosure: I appear in one of the videos.) The images are arresting. A flock of ravens. A multitude of black bugs swarm up stalks of grass. A white ball rolls back and forth on a table. A young woman sings a haunting melody while opposite her an older woman gazes intently. In between Mahony (the artist frequently appears in his own works) tries comically to ride a smashed and rusted out bicycle found by the river. Superimposed over these images are a mystifying array of animated symbols and shapes. The scenes flow by in a dreamlike sequence. Time is slowed. Images are turned sideways. Your ear catches mysterious sounds. When sitting alone with this installation the effect can be disorientating.
Still from Thursday's Child. Rory Mahony.
With most art we pass by and stop for a moment to make some casual aesthetic judgment. I like this one. I don’t like that one. But simple aesthetic judgments aren’t possible with Mahony’s works because he isn’t interested in just creating beautiful things. To be sure Mahony’s art is beautiful, but there also is an overpowering feeling that this artist is saying something. What makes Mahony’s work great (and at turns frustrating for this reviewer) is that what he’s saying isn’t obvious. In fact trying to understand Mahony’s art can be downright baffling perhaps because he may not be saying anything at all.
What is most disorientating for this logically minded (2+2=4) viewer is the lack of narrative. Scenes are offered with no overarching theme—a seemingly random assortment of intriguing vignettes. Furthermore each part of the triptych is out of sync and drifts in relation to each other. So each visitor’s experience is different.
Still from Thursday's Child. Rory Mahony.
There is so much detail in his work that’s easily overlooked or incomprehensible. The melody sung by the young woman is in Yiddish so most visitors will be unaware that she sings a lamentation. The animated runes contain some Jungian symbols—another fact likely lost on most viewers. In a fleeting frame a woman throws a human shaped biscuit to the gulls. Mahony packs so many layers of subtext into his work that in some ways the casual visitor will find his work inaccessible.
But there is another way to understand Mahony’s art – to simply stop thinking, to stop trying to make sense of the imagery and just experience them. I have visited this installation numerous times now. Often I am alone in this darkened room sitting on the viewing bench. You become enveloped in the sights and sounds. The images becomes less a film with an arc than a moving poem. And here perhaps is a fundamental atavistic artistic experience – it is a chance to step outside yourself and experience life from a different perspective. In this case a perspective probably closer to what your sensory organs experience -- disjointed images and sounds before our minds stitch meaning into them.
You can hear Rory Mahony speak about his exhibition at 7:30 PM Friday, September 26 at the Esplanade Art Gallery as part of Alberta Culture Days. LOOP runs until Saturday, October 4.
Medicine Hat News. September 26, 2014.