A Deft and Poetic Touch

The Looking Glass Sees Not and is Content.

Joe Mcgill is one of the more interesting artists to have emerged in Ireland in recent years and this is his second show in the U.S.
A self taught artist, Mcgill works with the mundane and the everyday, utilizing odds and ends such as light bulbs, pieces of twig and cardboard, which he encloses in framed boxes, and imbues with a sense of poetry and mystery. The words low key, and subtle immediately spring to mind, and though quiet, his best works have a commanding presence.
The strongest pieces in the exhibition are those in which Mcgill’s sense of poetry is made more tangible, and evident due to constraints imposed by his materials. For example, "Eclipse" which consists simply of a black fight bulb, or "Baptist, in which he has juxtaposed what appears to be a piece of a wasp's nest with a hat pin. The most formal piece, “The Adoration of the Magi", is probably this exhibition's most evocative, comprised of chess pawns contained within a card-board construction: it has numerous allusions and is a mine of suggestion.
It is difficult to unravel Mcgill’s influences, since he has skillfully assimilated them. The most obvious, that of Joseph Cornell is a superficial one. The influence of Beuys can be discerned, as can the Arts Povera artists, with their interest in transforming and elevating the everyday. Closer to home, his minimalism also brings to mind the Irish artist Mary Fitzgerald. Mcgill's delicate and subtle sense of poetry at once both his main source of strength and of weakness. In order to work, Mcgill's assemblages must strike a delicate balance between their ephemerallity and their allusions, and the work succeeds or fails by the tension created between the two.
Less successful works are "Loaves and Fish", comprised of what seems to be wheat stalks wrapped and obscured by tracing paper, a device which he employs again in "Keeper of the Gate". In the latter, he utilizes what could be a piece of wire or twig shaped like a butterfly which is concealed by the same means. Both pieces are too ethereal and insubstantial.
McGill’s deftness of touch and poetic sensibility are however un-common talents, which cannot be learned. This exhibition marks Joe Mcgill as an artist of talent and someone worth watching in the future.

Gary Coyle