Seeing God

A response to GOD by Bea McMahon and Conor McFeely

by Julie Morrissy

In the 1980s and ‘90s, the upstairs on Dublin bus had a distinct atmosphere, especially when smoking was still allowed. It was precarious to ascend the stairs, as the army green bus jerked and swung around corners. You never quite knew if you would make it to a seat, or who would be looking at you when you poked your head over the floor into the hazy atmosphere. It is similar to opening the door in a small town pub when all the local drinkers turn around to have a look at you. Partly because of the smoke but also due to the condensation on the inside of the windows, it almost felt like a dream up there. My daily landscapes emerged in new ways. The tops of trees were visible. I could peer into gardens I never saw from the street. The local golf course, usually completely hidden, appeared miraculously––vast stretches of perfectly manicured greens in the midst of a Dublin suburb. Back then, there was no Google Maps or Streetview. You couldn’t jump on a screen and see over walls. Upstairs, the bus was like a dream, but one that could easily turn into a nightmare. The second floor was for the more daring passengers who had less regard for rules. It was a space apart from reality, or a form of reality-plus, allowing you to see something extra and, sometimes, things you didn’t want to. It also felt like a space that took a certain effort to leave like sleep paralysis, when you know you’re dreaming but cannot wake yourself up.

At the GOD exhibition, I was immediately drawn to the rounded corners of the glass panes in The Autonomous Zone Between Static and Silence (TAZBSS) by Conor McFeely.  I noticed the panes because their curved edges and large rectangular form reminded me of the windows on the Dublin bus. In this work, two digital prints are framed between glass panes and positioned side by side, leaning against the wall. Between the glass are blown-up images of a tuning fork and shavings in one, and flattened cut-outs in the other. The objects sit on the stage of a scientific microscope with the clips visible. The scale of the images bring to mind the surreal way that objects sometimes appear in dreams—bigger or flatter than they should be. Bea McMahon’s Background and TV Rays dropped me further into a dreamlike state. Background is a video artwork that propels viewers through an overgrown garden and adjacent laneway with discarded appliances, ladders, and doorways—all from a frenetic first-person perspective. At times, the large black hole of a pipe takes up most of the screen. Other times, there are cloud-shaped cutouts of Nastassja Kinski’s character in Paris, Texas. Her mouth is moving, but it is unaccompanied by sound. Depicted in bold vibrant colours, these scenes heighten the surreal quality that runs parallel to McFeely’s altar-like structures, orbs, magnets, and brightly cast resin works. All of these elements gesture to different states of being. Specifically, it is the mixture of scale, colour and jarring juxtaposition of objects and images in Background, and in the exhibition as a whole, that suspend me in an unsettled dreamlike state, just like upstairs on the bus. It also reminds me of distressing dreams. Nightmares, I guess—ones where I am searching for or escaping something, or even being chased. McMahon’s black creaturely sculpture seeping over the TV screen (TV Rays) adds to my feeling of a lack of control, close to the measured panic I sometimes experience while I am sleeping. Nightmares, particularly because I often have them and I know that I’m having them while I’m having them, represent a sort of reality/not-reality that I recognise too in this exhibition. The experience is real—the fear—but the reality is not.

When thinking about what is real in the context of this exhibition, I cannot help but return to its title: GOD. If you’re going to call an exhibition GOD, inevitably belief systems, faith, and the unknown will be foregrounded in the public’s minds. There are a number of artworks that reinforce these religious associations for me. In McMahon’s Spreading Trouble, a fish-like object travels around a track set atop slices of bread. Stockinged Eels is a series of winding eel sculptures made from iron and covered in tights. I think of biblical references, like the loaves and fishes, our daily bread and, snakes. But it’s her piece OH OH oh that itself encourages an epiphanic reaction that strikes me most. When I first enter the exhibition, OH OH oh appears as a large flat white sheet against a wall. During my time in the space, a fan animates the sheet, causing the words “OH OH” to inflate. When this happens, I exclaim “Oohhhh!” into the empty space. I experience an epiphany of understanding how the piece works or what it is doing—suddenly seeing something that wasn’t apparent before. It’s like an apparition, but it also depicts a climax. The fan enlivens this object, which begins sedentary, making it move and fill up before it collapses again. For me, the piece suggests transcendence to a different realm of consciousness, be that through religion, sex, meditation, or psychedelics. These alternate ways of knowing are reinforced in the exhibition’s references to anarchy, mathematics and science, creating a sense of competing belief systems that can co-exist. Mark O’Gorman outlines this idea in his exhibition text with reference to mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, who believed that maths and religion/God are “mutually exclusive”. Not so for McFeely and McMahon, by my estimation. Structures that could equally be altars or laboratory benches are a prominent feature of McFeely’s work. There is also a literal resin sculpture of Jesus Christ in The Autonomous Zone Between Static and Silence, the title of which perhaps is a reference to anarchist writer Hakim Bey’s book T. A. Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone. McFeely’s video artwork in The Autonomous Zone Between Static and Silence plays an omniscient voice on a loop that repeats what sounds like anarchist or revolutionary slogans. There is also a focus on scientific elements such as water and particles, and the diving sequence in the film strikes me as mathematical in the precision and timing of the diver’s movement. The diver perfectly brings together the competing ideas of the natural world and science as he calculates how to jump from a man-made structure to join his human, vulnerable being with the water below. This marriage of worldviews or orientations is reinforced by the countdown in the video artwork, a reminder of sending humans into space to find other forms of life.

I’m writing this piece three weeks after I saw the exhibition. The work has stayed in my mind the way dreams do—when I unexpectedly remember a particular image or sound and it takes a second to locate it in my brain, to associate it, to remember that it was from a dream and not from real life.