Love is in the air at Townhall Cavan

Damian McCarney

The centrepiece of the ‘Love?’ exhibition at the Townhall Centre Cavan would be worth the entrance fee alone - if there was an entrance fee. The arts space however has signed up to the concept of free love – so it’s all the more reason to head along before the contemporary arts show finishes up this weekend.

The main theatre space hosts a video installation, a collaboration between film makers Padraig Conaty, Darren Kelly and playwright Philip Doherty. Two enormous screens face each other, each displaying short films. Perched on a table in the cross-hairs of two projection beams is a rose, starkly silhouetted onto the centre of each screen.
The longest of the film loops times in at just 45 seconds, but given there are 12 images projected per second, they’ve crammed an enormous amount into the project. As one screen displays a saccharine, Disney-esque version of romance and relationships, the other screen contrasts with a gritty, at times pornographic and violent interpretation of the same subject, concluded with a nuclear holocaust (probably not suitable for all ages, but then the scenes are so fleeting that it’s hard to say whether anyone would be upset by them).
Presumably the silhouette of the rose – although a cliché, it’s the only real life component of the project - is a shorthand for the gesture which may initiate the relationships. How that feature vanishes as the viewer gives into the visual barrage - it’s a very clever device.
Given the quick-fire visual assault of the images, it is nearly impossible to grasp onto any single reference point. It’s bamboozling, hypnotic and intoxicating in equal measure. There’s no soundtrack, but the colourful images are loud enough to deafen everything else.
Love? is billed as a “playful, satirical and thought-provoking experience”, a collaboration between visual artists Siobhán Harton and Joe Keenan, and playwright Philip Doherty, with contributions from many others. With a cow's heart in a glass box, an evolution of baby bottles, sound installations, and the most intiimate silent disco imaginable, amongst the artworks, it lives up to the hype. Check it out for yourself - Love? runs until Saturday, March 4.