Reviews
Amanda Dunsmore has cleverly subverted the very idea of a portrait in a series of video works that take Irish public figures as their subjects. Generally speaking, people try to look their best when posing for a photograph. But maintaining a straight face over several minutes would try anyone’s patience, and Dunsmore’s skill is to catch the shifts in expression that reveal something of her subjects’ character.
Or not, as the case may be: Martin McGuinness was perhaps the most compelling of Dunsmore’s subjects, facing down her camera with ease.
David Norris is not quite as unyielding or as confident. Created as part of the Galway County Council Public Art Residency Programme, which saw Dunsmore spend a year as artist-in-residence with the older LGBT community in Galway, Dunsmore’s new work, David, features the independent senator seated in silence. He is dressed in an elegant three-piece suit, his fastidiousness extending to the dotted handkerchief that matches his tie. He faces the camera head on, but soon adjusts his pose, crossing one knee over the other before uncrossing it again. At one point, he begins to look nervous, at another he seems about to break into a smile.
The longer viewers spend with the work the more aware they will become of the minor crinkles in Norris’s appearance. His tie is slightly askance, the collar of his shirt slightly rumpled. And for a man who has been such a public and vocal campaigner Norris seems uneasy with the attention, though it may be that he is discomforted by the requirement that he not talk.
One’s eye is inevitably drawn to the background. Dunsmore filmed Norris in the attic of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, in a blue room used for storage. Boxes and books are stacked on a table behind him on one side, while a grandfather’s clock stands against the wall on the other.
The books reference Norris’ work as an academic and Joyce enthusiast, while the presence of the clock, whose hands have stopped, seems more ominous: Norris announced last summer that he was seriously ill with cancer.
David is beautifully shot, a work of apparent simplicity that raises some complex questions about the self we present to the public.
Star Rating: 4/5
The Irish artist Garret Baker’s debut album opens with ‘Delirium Tremens,’ a track that owes more than a little to the phrasings of Leonard Cohen. As influences go, one could do worse. But Baker lacks Cohen’s quiet authority and his uncanny ability to pen a lyric that seems to have been around forever.
The glacially paced ‘Delirium Tremens’ sets the tone. Endtimes Praise is a collection of 13 tracks that showcases Baker’s love of words and melodies.
His influences are writ large. On ‘The Desultory Streets,’ the best title on the album, he sounds like a young Bob Dylan, but elsewhere he sounds like yet another young buck paying homage to Glen Hansard.
The better tracks include ‘Cecelia,’ ‘Dandelions’ and ‘The Moment Eternal’.
Baker is fond of a yarn. ‘The Ballad of Patrick and Rita’ tells of a young man who travelled from Galway to Dublin and ended up selling Big Issues outside the gates of Trinity College Dublin. Rita is the girl he falls hopelessly in love with at first sight.
Baker is aided by many of his peers on the fringes of Irish music, including Lauren Brady and Emily Gahan, and the bands Mongoose and Two Headed Wolf.
The album has one of the most fetching cover designs of an Irish artist in quite some time, but the song titles and information are rendered in a font so convoluted as to make them illegible.
Endtimes Praise is a resolutely quiet affair, an album that does not impose itself on the listener and yet rewards repeated listenings. Baker’s reluctance to maintain a website, or post any information about himself online, is endearing, but indicates he lacks the ambition to pursue a full-time career in music.
Not that one should hold that against him, but there is enough talent on evidence here to suggest he should take himself more seriously.
Star Rating: 3/5
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