After the Future – Jennifer Cunningham ★★★★★

GIAF Festival Gallery, Market Street, Galway

Modern decay

Jennifer Cunningham’s After the Future extends her outstanding show at the RHA’s Ashford Gallery last year, All That Surrounds Us. In her beautifully made mixed-media works on paper, Cunningham evokes a post-industrial landscape of dereliction, but of a very particular sort. She observes “the ways in which modern realms of collective pleasure decay”, more often than not characterising witnesses to this decay in a way that recalls those bemused, coolly dispassionate protagonists in the dystopian novels of JG Ballard.

Except that Cunningham’s viewpoints are female, of indeterminate age, but spanning childhood through adolescence. In a way, there’s a dual, interchangeable narrative running through her work: the dissolution of the physical fabric of the recreational landscape, and the psychological progression from the utopian magic of childhood imagination to a dawning awareness of change, loss, complication and limitations. Less this sounds prescriptive, these ideas emerge seamlessly and organically from, rather than being imposed upon, her work.

Many of the precisely described structures we see in her images are drawn from her native Galway and are instantly recognisable, though not a Galway familiar to most visitors. Images emerge from preparatory washes of colour and have a hallucinatory or dreamlike quality. She has also moved very effectively into dramatised video, with Glass House, and miniature three-dimensional maquettes. Aidan Dunne Irish Times 2018