Hazel Dooney and Creed O'Hanlon

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This was published 17 years ago

Hazel Dooney and Creed O'Hanlon

By Ashley Crawford and Reviewer

Hazel Dooney found considerable commercial success early in her career with self-portraits rendered in tight graphic lines and highly charged colours. With a strong nod to pop art, these works were very much about surface and, as such, came across as slight and one-dimensional. With her current show, however, Dooney has ripped the surface asunder, revealing a troubled and troubling potpourri of psychological self-investigation and an obsessive fascination with arcane ritual.

With her earlier work, one wondered whether she could in fact draw. Venus in Hell removes all doubt. For all the cacophony of imagery, there is a surety of line that balances the maelstrom of blood, skulls, bones, snakes and flames that leap from the paper.

To tear into this nether world of self-appraisal, Dooney employs symbolism and themes from African and Caribbean voodoo alongside more personal diaristic notations and quotes from other texts, crowding the page with incantations and the scrawled names of figures sacred to voodoo.

That there is an element of self-portraiture is beyond dispute, suggestive of a rich fantasy life imbued with sexuality and self-loathing. The figures depicted, almost all female, recline in suggestive poses, hips and breasts sensually depicted. But at the same time they burn and bleed, engulfed in flames or the jaws of gigantic serpents.

One feels that Dooney is treading very close to the edge in these works; there is no sense of artifice, more a ruthless sincerity. In one panel she quotes occasional collaborator Creed O'Hanlon, stating that: "The insane always occupy multiple realities: their internal narratives are always different to their actual or external experiences."

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In Dooney's case, her internal narratives find release in an exorcism of vividly coloured paint and stringent pencil work. Dooney manages to get away with being literal with her source material through the sheer energy she employs. The Serpent God Damballa appears throughout and the infamous Baron Samedi, the all-knowing god of death, noted for disruption, obscenity, debauchery, and having a particular fondness for rum, is depicted in traditional top hat and black tuxedo, as if he were an undertaker.

Dooney's figures crawl and hang or, in Sometimes the Truth Hurts, Sometime it Feels Real Good, have interracial intercourse. In Erzule Ge - Rouge she hangs from her ankles. This is self-portraiture as catharsis.

Such variations on self-portraiture are rare. One gets a hint of similar approaches in the works of artists such as Monika Tichacek and Pat Brassington, where the female form is contorted, but unlike those artists Dooney relies on the gestural mark, making the works that much more personal.

Although far less literal, Creed O'Halloran's photography offers similar obsessive self-investigation. These are mysterious, blurred mosaics where the viewer feels impelled to make sense of images seemingly caught in peripheral vision. There's a powerful sense of restlessness and movement in his photography, as though he were driven to capture each and every moment before his memory failed.

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