Concentrated Words

Typically, McClure is drawn not to the focal point of whatever film or text she is dealing with, but instead to slightly out of the way or peripheral things like footnotes, subtitles, or definitions. In a memorable work not included in this exhibition, she transcribed two definitions of the concept of sin, from a Christian text and a Buddhist one. You notice that one (the Christian one) is a lot more marked up, busy, packed, and congested, while the other bears significantly fewer marks. McClure’s transformation of written language into a purely pictorial one succinctly reveals whoppingly divergent cultural and religious mores. In any event, the language McClure uses is almost always involved in some kind of negotiation, in the form of explanation, exegesis, translation, and in general the difficult attempt to pin down slippery matters, oftentimes not exactly perfectly, as the frequent mishaps that one finds in film subtitles clearly attest. It’s also interesting to note that as an artist from Northern Ireland who has spent much of the past 10 years living and working in Japan (and who is fluent in Japanese) McClure has had more than her own share of cross-cultural and cross-lingual negotiations. Hardly is this work about, or illustrative of, such an experience, but it’s certainly informed by it in some measure, perhaps deeply so. Several of the Western films McClure references (Mystery Train by Jim Jarmusch, Tokyo-ga by Wim Wenders) specifically concern encounters with Japan; her own inscriptions of Japanese characters reach back into a tradition of calligraphy; and her acute focus on paper suggests an engagement with another long-standing tradition in Japanese art.

One of her most striking works here is an almost crazily satisfying, velvety red field subtly festooned at the bottom with two rows of subtly luminous, tiny white squares. What those squares consist of is a record of the Japanese subtitles in Wim Wender’s film Tokyo-ga: a film by a German director set in Japan, subtitled in Japanese, and then brought into an entirely new condition by a Northern Irish artist who lives part time in Kyoto. Different sensibilities, genres, facilities with language, and intentions mingle and collide, while at the same time, one is drawn into the spare, enigmatic beauty of McClure’s work. Those tiny squares at the bottom recall minimalist-inflected serial repetition but they also seem like nodes or modules packed with elusive information, perhaps as well like some arcane code, or talismanic diagram.