2019 05 September/October | The VAN & miniVAN

The miniVAN

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2019 05 September/October

Moving Image and Photography Special Issue – Out Now!

Van So 2019 Cover

VAN’s 2019 themed issue focuses on contemporary Irish photography and moving image, probing the expanded parameters of each medium in the digital age. With an abundance of image-making technologies now readily at hand within our daily lives, this issue considers how static and moving images are created, disseminated, consumed and stored. In technical terms, it has never been easier to produce images; however, some argue that with the plenitude of media now available, it is becoming harder to create images that are culturally relevant or interesting. As evidenced throughout this issue, such inquiries manifest in current artistic practice through rejections or subversions of digital technologies. This includes a resurgence of…

04 N25 Douglas From The Series By The Way Dara Mcgrath 2003

Commonplaces: The Topographical Turn

JUSTIN CARVILLE CONSIDERS THE SHIFTING SIGNIFICANCE OF ‘PLACE’ WITHIN 21ST-CENTURY IRISH PHOTOGRAPHY. The presentation of ‘New Irish Works 2019’ at the Museum of Contemporary Photography – a pop-up space located in Dublin Castle, as part of this year’s PhotoIreland Festival – provides a brief snapshot of the variegated practices of contemporary Irish photography. The diverse projects exhibited in ‘New Irish Works’ range from the personal and the political, to the investigative, formal and conceptual. Phelim Hoey’s ‘La Machine’, for example, explores his diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis through diaries, sculptural forms and motion studies that reference the anatomising and visual abstraction of technology, modernism and the body in the work of…

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Culture of Experimental Practice

ALICE BUTLER PROVIDES A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY IRISH MOVING IMAGE PRACTICE. It is difficult to appreciate the volume and diversity of contemporary practice in artist moving image and experimental film in Ireland without taking stock of its comparatively short history and modest origins. When artists and filmmakers in Europe, the UK and America – such as Germaine Dulac, Len Lye and Maya Deren – began experimenting with new possibilities for cinema as an artform in the early part of the twentieth century, they were also laying the groundwork for the foundation in the 1960s and ‘70s of the cooperatives and distributors (including the London Film-Makers’ Co-Op, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative…

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Time and Time Again

JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS KEVIN ATHERTON, FRANCES HEGARTY AND ANDREW STONES ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF THEIR FILMMAKING PRACTICES. Joanne Laws: How do you approach research and what are some of the prominent themes that have emerged within your moving image practice to date? Kevin Atherton: The ‘research’ word has entered the vocabulary of visual artists when they talk about what they do, resulting in a conflation of practice and research, which has led to a lot of posturing and confusion. I hear artists’ talk about doing their research and frequently what they’re referring to is old-fashioned ‘resourcefulness’. As regards my research, I’m not sure whether I do research at all or,…

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Image Tendencies

PÁDRAIG SPILLANE INTERVIEWS THREE VISUAL ARTISTS WORKING IN PHOTOGRAPHY. Pádraig Spillane: Each of you maintains what could be described as a ‘hybrid’ practice, engaging with both analogue and digital photographic techniques, while pushing the parameters of image-making and display. Perhaps you could introduce some of your working methods? Roseanne Lynch: I am living in Leipzig temporarily and making new work with the Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau. Initially this new work was a response to the Bauhaus school building (designed by Walter Gropius and built in 1926), as well as the Buildings and Materials Research Archive. However, the work has progressed. Now, I am bringing my practice to the principles of the Bauhaus school’s…

J. Savage

‘FIX’

Hang Tough Gallery, Dublin20 July – 3 August 2019 An exhibition is the considered placement and grouping of things that talk to each other about, around or alongside certain philosophical and/or conceptual concerns; it is a gathering and expression of ideas or thematic inquiries underlying visual conceits. The exhibition press release can provide a summary of, or guide to, such activity. The conceptual framework for ‘FIX’ was to exhibit photographic work by five artists, that has strayed or become ‘un-fixed’ from the self-defined constraints usually found within their individual practices. The exhibition press release acknowledges the artists’ diverging creative perspectives, while proposing “a common thread of identity and location”.1 Given…

Gb, A Thing Is A Hole In A Thing It Is Not,2010, Installation Image From Lismore Castle

State of the Medium

CHRISTOPHER STEENSON TALKS TO GERARD BYRNE ABOUT CONSERVING MEDIA ART IN THE DIGITAL AGE. With a career spanning close to three decades, Gerard Byrne is known for his complex film installations that displace sequential narratives with non-linear playback systems. Byrne’s films often incorporate multiple viewing planes, where episodic reenactments extend across the gallery space, running parallel to one another, encouraging the audience to explore the space, while piecing together the fragmented narrative. A notable example is A thing is a hole is a thing it is not (2010), which charts separate episodes in the history of minimalism, including: a radio conversation between Bruce Glaser, Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Dan…

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‘Fast Slow Fast’

CCA Derry~Londonderry8 June – 10 August 2019 My day-job is punctuated by a variety of tasks, one of which is to create and circulate promotional images on displays. Source imagery arrives through inter-office email, mostly as custom-ratio JPEGs, PDFs, or on occasion – and most laborious of all – as PowerPoints. You might assume that this is mundane work; however, to someone with my interests, there is something profound about this cutting, pasting, alpha masking and exporting. The images become temporal objects, displaying evidence of their imperfections, rearrangements and cropping, but only remain for however long their promotions are relevant. When they are gone, so too is the time invested…

Islanders Watching The Regatta, Clare Island, Co. Mayo, 1938

‘A Modern Eye: Helen Hooker O’Malley’s Ireland’

Gallery of Photography / National Photographic Archive, Dublin21 June – 1 September 2019 / 21 June – 2 November 2019 ‘A Modern Eye: Helen Hooker O’Malley’s Ireland’ begins with a striking display of wanderlust, inquisitiveness and enviable means. An adventurous artist, born into a wealthy American family, Helen Hooker began her life-long habit of itinerant practice from a young age. Among the early shots, which document people in Mongolia, Japan, Korea and China, is the avant-garde painter Pavel Filonov, with whom she was training in Russia, taken in 1924, when she was in her early twenties. Amidst the artist’s trove of photographs – which she donated to the National Library…

Philippe Chancel 8

‘Do Governments Lie?’

Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast6 June – 27 July 2019 As part of this year’s Belfast Photo Festival, the Golden Thread Gallery simultaneously held three very different exhibitions, at three very different qualitative levels: Philippe Chancel’s excellent and subtle observation of life within North Korean ideological strictures; a dispassionate survey of political discourse on social media by Marc Lee; and a terrible, ostensibly anti-Trump installation by Erik Kessels & Thomas Mailaender, which is so devoid of the potential for critical engagement that the president would, I’m sure, greet it with gleeful delight. Philippe Chancel’s ‘Kim Happiness’ consists of a selection from the large body of work he has made in North…

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