Doherty’s rich black-and-white images are half melancholia, half haunting. Large photographs and nearly still videos transpose a decrepit, eerie Northern Irish landscape to the barely-built Nine Lems. Deserted streets, the woods, even a shore’s silent cove turn into locations for a crime reconstruction drama.
An actor’s sombre voiceover completes this sorry mood board. “Where battles raged. […] Names changed. Language lost.” This land can age a man prematurely. Even the trees are in mourning here. Their memory will fade only with death.
Doherty’s tragipoetic timing and mise-en-scène can be masterly. This exhibition’s staging skips a beat, however. The installation is too neat, too classically formal. The gallery’s overlit, airless white cube denatures Doherty’s places and asks too much of the viewer far too quickly.
