Darren Banks - Soothsayers, Oonagh Hegarty - Tabloid Alchemy

The initial aural and visual smack in the face and ears from Darren Banks’ centrepiece ‘Where Everything Is’ is quite an experience. The spike in intensity from the quiet harbour-side exterior to the cacophony within mirrors the peaks and troughs in pressure which characterise Sierra Metro’s current exhibition ‘Darren Banks—Soothsayers, Oonagh Hegarty—Tabloid Alchemy’.

‘Where Everything Is’ is a filmic and sculptural assemblage, acting as a noisy anchor to the quieter sculptures on the periphery of the room. The piece is based on Otto Dix’s ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’, in which the sins are depicted as grotesque allegorical figures. On each screen is a repeating clip, resembling in appearance or theme a figure from Dix’s painting. The screens are surrounded by a scaffolding of props that reinforce the comparison: beneath a pie-eating contest, sofa cushions sag under the contestant’s weight. This flitting between the ephemeral and the solid—from Dix’s painting, to the clips, to the props—reflects Banks’ concern with quantifying equally all types of experience, from hyper-reality to the phenomenological. The addition of found domestic objects draws Banks’ exploration of horror and sci-fi to a more personal level, making ‘Carcass’, an upturned picnic table with a blood red blob pooling out from underneath it, all the more creepy.

Finally, unlit and tucked in the corner near the entrance are two pieces which act as weighty counterpoints to the rest of the room. The first is a fire sign (‘This is a Sign’), the second ‘Crowley’s Cult’, which echoes the blood blob disc of ‘Carcass’ but is made of found sawdust. Why the extreme subtlety, and the seemingly banal choice of objects? Banks’ work also documents “the just forgotten and ‘recently redundant”, regurgitating them in another context and imbuing them with new discordant associations.

These final works tie in with Oonagh Hegarty’s drawings on paper in Room 2. The initial draw to the pleasing geometric spirographic forms is jarred by the discovery that each piece is invisibly bordered by the same un-shapely form, which can be seen in its original state as a black lumbering silhouette on another piece. Despite this link between the hidden forms in both Banks’ and Hegarty’s works, there is still a considerable dissonance between the two rooms; between Hegarty’s delicate, thoughtful comments on tabloid culture and Banks’ aural assault, which unfortunately makes it difficult to fully appreciate the former.