Difference Engine – Manifestation V – 2011

Soma Contemporary

Jessica Foley

This evolving touring art project features the Irish artists Mark Cullen, Wendy Judge, Gillian Lawler and Jessica Foley as well as the British-born Chinese artist Gordon Cheung. Lawler’s futuristic- looking, quasi-architectural paintings play off Judge’s hand-moulded mountain peaks, the best of which, Reliable Wonders, appears to levitate. Cullen’s fluorescent strip-lighting tepee (entitled Justified Ancient) firmly anchors the exhibition in sci-fi territory, but Foley’s inquisitive approach borrows more from the conventions of the school science experiment, including the found-object construction Electromagnet.
Cheung’s War video, with its bronco-riding cowboy in a psychedelic landscape, leaks the mesmerizing sound of the Door’s The End, while the largest of Lawler’s paintings, Urban Mountain 3, pictured left – in which one of her trademark chequered structures projects from a charred landscape – is among the shows highlights. Although dark, Difference Engine hums with a pleasingly pervasive atmosphere of possibility.

Cristin Leach Hughes, Sunday Times, 2011