Art Choice

Work by five artists on billboards across Dublin, and at the Project gallery, subverts familiar images and plays with our ideas about public spaces. Oyvind Fahlstrom’s parody of the Esso logo with the letters LSD, above, undercuts the multinational’s image, while Ferdinand Kriwet’s bold graphics form a circle where words such as “nature” and “revolution” can be deciphered, though there is no overarching message. Didier Rittener reproduces images drawn from various media to create a tableau of artistic recycling, while Shannon Bool’s lyrical piece, featuring two swallows beside a block of dark colour, also combines different representation systems. The Dublin artist Garrett Phelan’s No Incinerator comments wittily on environmental destruction, mocking the convoluted language of political propaganda while mimicking the publicity methods of marginalised groups. Despite their diverse approaches, the artists skilfully use a medium usually associated with advertising and propaganda to question the workings of the media and the use of public space.