The material for this exhibition comes from objects created for decoration: sparkly hanging things, patterned clothing, carpets, wallpaper, curtains. However, Angela Fulcher treats something potentially trivial with intelligence and delicacy, intervening with a touch light enough to avoid a kind of kitchen sink drama of scattered interiors and instead only implying a human narrative of the domestic as lived space, and one primarily focused upon the strangeness of its artefacts. Untitled (Crystal Cabinet #2), a photographic collage, is the only direct imaging of people in the exhibition. Small black and white photographs of what appears to be a dinner party sit underneath flocked wallpaper, cut to give a glimpse of finely dressed figures who seem strangely dissociated from each other. It is a good example of the way in which form is used to resist hackneyed narratives, the sharp geometric cuts into the wallpaper which reveal the image below allow both elements to exist materially and conceptually, creating thematic coherence, but avoiding straightforward conflation.

 
What is interesting in Fulcher’s treatment of her materials is that it is the material itself that really comes to the fore; this exhibition is compelling because of the unexpected sharpness and precision with which she approaches familiar objects. One of the standout pieces is the three-metre triangle of carpet that sits in the centre of the gallery. Simple in its conception, this worn piece of patterned carpet is inset with a smaller triangular section of similar pattern that highlights the geometric against the ornamentation of the original. This intervention is seemingly straightforward, but it does much to such a loaded artefact. Fulcher chooses a section of carpet that is patterned according to the ubiquitous fashions of the recent past; it is strikingly familiar but equally nonspecific. That the pattern is cut into in an exercise of precise shape-making means that the busy visuals of the carpet are sharply brought to a halt, the contemporary popular interest in clean straight lines obliquely superseding the more florid decoration of the past. The wear and fraying that subtly mark the material makes it seem lived with, perhaps for too long. This treatment of materials is repeated in Untitled (Crystal Cabinet #3). This synthetic satin curtain material is carefully scored with sharp lines, a regular and repeated pattern that is echoed in the strange wallpaper construction that sits on the floor in front of it. Looking more organic than synthetic, the folded wallpaper resembles an origami hedgehog in pale pink. Again, the curtain is marked by age; rust coloured stains discolour the cloth, barely perceptible from a distance, but complicating the surface of the piece from close up. Where it would be easy for Fulcher to emphasise the kitschness of the materials she chooses, encouraging disdain for chintz and tastelessness in her viewers, instead she considers these things seriously, showing them as everyday items well used, appreciated, but also loaded with meanings not often regarded.
 
The photographic collage Untitled (Crystal Cabinet #6) shows images of the front walls and gates of northside estate houses, the little details that individualise the photographs: pillars, cars, gates and satellite dishes again portray mass design and lived in and personal. Cut across the images is a thin white line, scoring a gap into the representation of familiar environments. It is a line thin enough that it does not obscure that which it represents, but instead reminds the viewer of the representational, the white of the gap echoing the white of the gallery wall. Again, loaded and familiar imagery competes with formal concerns, the straightness of the line highlighting a grid like pattern in the work, the vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines of the photographs become visual echoes of the patterns that Fulcher scores onto materials elsewhere.
 
In this way Crystal Cabinet is a coherent and condensed exhibition. The precision of line and pattern in the interventions that Fulcher makes to all of her materials (whether found, like the carpet and curtains, or made by the artists, as in the photographs), a visual language is established that repeats across the detritus used to construct the exhibition. Fulcher’s skill is to make familiar items strange enough that we can perceive them without being overwhelmed by their initial associations, but not so strange that these resonances are removed completely. In this way we are given a means to approach these ubiquitous objects so that we can appreciate their peculiarity, but we are also invited to analyse, connect and reimagine them within new aesthetic and symbolic frames.
 
 
Angela Fulcher: Crystal Cabinet was on view 19 January – 23 February 2012.

Also  in  the  same  concrete,  unfinished  offices  (a  Creative Limerick space at the centre of this EV+A) with  their  Banham-­style  Brutalism,  Loretto  Cooney’s  delicate oil paintings (Did you mean fir tree), their imagery  sifted  from  the  Web,  echoed  the  desaturated  hues of Simon English’s Klee-­sized Untitled Scenes from a Journey.

 
Actually,  the  entire  Catherine  Street  and  Faber  Studios (another new Limerick art space run by graduates) were at the centre of many events organized by Spiritstore’s  Culture  Dig  Weekend  which  transformed  an anonymous street into relationships between people,  with  flamenco,  astronomy  talks,  ghost  walks,  poetry readings, street theatre, film shorts, and an Art in The Making  do,  where  Limerick  and  Crawford  art  students met for Kevin Flanagan’s talk ‘Copyleft and Creative Commons’ and to plan ahead.
 
Finally,  the  LSAD  Church  Gallery  exhibited  Shin Egashira’s Beauty of Our Pain, a set of wooden sculptures  whose  ancient  craft  shuns  screws  or  nails.  Monumental objects that would look more in a place at  a  siege  than  at  a  work-­out,  these  full-­size  fitness  machines were complemented by a video showing them in use in a real fitness centre next to modern day contraptions.  The  accompanying  isometric  drawings  take the medieval association further, suggesting that what  people  accept  in  trying  to  conform  to  contemporary norms of alienated beauty is tantamount to torture.
 
 
Surplus Value
Occupy Space, Limerick
David Brancaleone
 
Curated  by  Michelle  Horrigan,  Surplus  Value  was  hosted by Occupy Space, one of the many new art spaces  in  empty  shops  and  offices,  made  available  thanks to Creative Limerick. Technically, surplus value is what is left over after the worker has been paid her wage in the capitalist mode of production, in which labour power becomes a commodity with an exchange value. To me, the phrase ‘surplus value’ brings to mind the  consequences  today  of  the  logic  of  profit:  for  instance, the madness of tough-love capitalism and a thirty-­year headlong plunge into financialization (speculation  on  derivatives,  hedge  funds,  and  profiteering  from interest on debt). In today’s context (economic meltdown),  only  the  risk  of  impending  bankruptcy  makes imaginable that privately owned banks can be purchased by public funds (and somehow, it is All Our Fault).
 
Playful irony issues from Sean Lynch’s The Bandits Live Comfortably  in  the  Ruin  (2006),  which  appropriates  vintage footage of the failed demolition of a Limerick mill  in  the  1980s  –  and  puts  it  on  a  loop.  So  it  keeps  failing. The value of Hayek’s and then Friedman’s Chicago  School  neoliberal  economics  are  also  on  a  loop and keep failing; meantime, speculation replaces production  (here)  and  exploitation  of  manual  labour  has mostly shifted to where we cannot see it (the Majority  World).  In  the  West,  following  the  downsizing, restructuring and collapse of manufacturing, white collar surplus value is extracted increasingly  (but  not  exclusively)  from  social  communication or ‘immaterial labour’. Its exploitation is much harder to measure, because it always exceeds the working day.
 
As for exploitation, Mike Fitzpatrick’s  Dealer  Ties  (1996-­97), a rack of sixty white ties, each sporting the photograph  of  a  New  York  art  dealer,  brings  to  mind  greedy gallery takings and Anglo Saxon ‘club ties’, thus conjuring  up  the  intimate  atmosphere  of  the  art  market – with an exception, a homeless woman slightly set apart. Perhaps what the clique excludes is her  value.  That  concept  of  ‘exclusion’  was  a  (moral)  fallback position in the 1990s, after any notion of (social  and  political)  emancipation  had  been  abandoned. For The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), the  ‘artistic  critique’  of  capitalism  has  always  hinged  on consumption and alienation, but Surplus Value draws  my  attention  to  the  ‘social  critique’  also  discussed by Boltanski and Chiapello, aimed at production, labour and exploitation.
 
Angela  Fulcher’s  Hurry  On  Sundown  is  an  afterthought on such matters. It hangs from above, making a second ceiling out of what looked like a large multi coloured kite, stretching from white wall to white wall, stitched together from after‐the‐event tents, leftovers from  a  music  festival.  Some  circa  ’68  music  festivals  reclaimed public space, but then business got in on the act and something bigger than just the show was suppressed. An afterthought. In many ways, theory is also  just  that:  an  afterthought,  a  fidelity;  what  still  needs to be said (and done) after the event. It thinks again,  suggesting  the  possibility  of  intervention,  not  nostalgia.
 
 
Surplus Value was on view 7 May–7 June 2010.