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 analogue production and presentation formats, leading to the creation of deliberately flawed images, which sit in opposition to the ‘non-reality’ fostered by digital post-production. In addition, many artists are engaged in a ‘reassertion of objecthood’, often involving the assemblage of pre-internet material, including printed matter, found photographs or archival footage. This, in turn, creates physical repositories of knowledge, with the space of the exhibition – characterised by non-linear, sculptural or immersive installations – being pivotal to encounters with lens-based work.

Central to this themed issue are interviews with artists at various career stages, who work with photography – namely Roseanne Lynch, Darn Thorn, Róisín White, Dragana Jurišić, Ciarán Óg Arnold, Locky Morris, Vera Ryklova and Fanfa Otal Simal – as well as artists working predominantly with moving image, such as Gerard Byrne, Clare Langan, Myrid Carten, Eoghan Ryan, Emily McFarland, Bassam Al-Sabah, Frances Hegarty & Andrew Stones, Kevin Atherton and Atoosa Pour Hosseini. 

This issue features two specially-commissioned essays: Alice Butler provides a survey of contemporary Irish moving image practice; while Justin Carville outlines the significance of ‘place’ in Irish photography. This issue also profiles Irish organisations, such as the production facilities, The Darkroom and Digital Arts Studios, and the Gallery of Photography Ireland. Recent film screenings are profiled – namely ‘Snapshots’ at Dingle International Film Festival and aemi’s recent touring film programme, curated by Sarah Browne – as well as prominent photography and moving image exhibitions, including: ‘The Parted Veil’ at The Glucksman; ‘New Irish Works 2019’ at PhotoIreland Festival; and ‘Screentime’ at the Green on Red Gallery. 

Offering archival perspectives, Fifi Smith outlines the evolution of the MExIndex, a database of Irish moving image works, while Seán Kissane discusses the David Kronn photographic collection, gifted to IMMA. Dialogue surrounding photographic and moving image practice is fostered through contributions from John Duncan, editor of Source Photographic Review, and University of Ulster lecturer, Clare Gallagher, who discusses her practice-based PhD.  

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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 the French scientist and photographer, Étienne-Jules Marey. Dorje de Burgh’s ‘Dream the End’ – a work of mourning, loss, and memory – interrogates his own familial archive as a sort of imaginative, open-ended and unresolved link between the past and the present. Rósín White draws on found photographs and archival materials to explore the legacy of psychiatry through Silas Weir Mitchell’s late nineteenth-century ‘Rest Cure’ therapy, as a treatment for hysteria and nervous illnesses in women; while Sarah Flynn’s ‘Uinse’ combines still life, landscape images and detailed studies of human hands to explore nature-society dualism, through the fungal disease affecting Ash tree forestation in Ireland.

The range and scope of projects in this timely survey also reflect the transnationalism of Irish photography, both in terms of photographers living and working in the UK and Europe, and Irish photographers pursuing projects that resonate outside of the island of Ireland. Zoe Hamill’s ‘A Map Without Words’, draws together still life images of archaeological objects, portraits and photographs of specific locations to investigate her homeland and the place where she now finds herself located, in a series exploring the psychic relations between image and place that resonates with Victorian folklore and antiquity. Aisling McCoy’s series, ‘and live the space of a door’, explores the historical and political legacy of Berlin’s former Tempelhof airport, now repurposed as a refugee shelter through its banal spatial and architectural configurations; while Robert Ellis’s ongoing project, ‘Proverbs’, focuses on the people and landscapes of the former British protectorate of Uganda. 

As a microcosm of contemporary Irish photography, ‘New Irish Works’ evidences a broad spectrum of investigative and conceptual strategies, forms of display and technical inscriptions of photography as a medium and form of representation. The identification of an overarching theme, subject, aesthetic or visual strategy is thus difficult to discern. However, McCoy’s and Ellis’s works both gesture toward the centrality of place, belonging and the everyday bodily interactions with natural and built environments, which has featured prominently in Irish photography for the last decade. This turn to ‘place’ is not something that should be taken frivolously. Place is not simply about fixed geographic location, or the abstract contours of physical spaces; it is also about the material environments of social relations, amongst and between individuals and communities. For the last decade, much of Irish photography has not so much focused on the representation or the objective appearance of physical locations, but on conveying subjective interactions and attachments to place. It has focused on transmitting the quotidian bodily interactions with and within emotionally, culturally and socially resonate places.

The concern with place in distinction to space in recent Irish photography, and the routine interactions of communities within everyday environments, has marked a social and ideological shift – particularly within prominent work made during the two decades either side of the millennium. In what might be termed the ‘topographical turn’ of Celtic Tiger and post Celtic-Tiger Irish photography, the emphasis became the spatial reconfiguration of urban and suburban Irish landscapes. In series such as Dara McGrath’s ‘By the Way’ (2003) and Martin Cregg’s ‘Midlands’ (2009), the boom-era landscapes of speculative property developments and partially-built ghost estates (the most immediate material ruins of financial collapse) refracted back to the viewer the accelerated transformation of the Celtic Tiger period, through its visible spatial forms. In this work – and that of numerous other photographers of this period – the transformation of Ireland through global capitalism was measured in the spatial transformation of cities and towns as degrees of what Marc Augé defined as ‘non-places’. Emphasising the rectilinear forms and muted hues of the newly-built environments of business and retail parks, motorways and housing estates, the detached topographical gaze of photography from this period depicted the emerging boom-time landscapes as a peopleless spaces. Devoid of human presence, configurations of the Irish landscape through property development were represented as hollowed out, indistinct, transient spaces. They forged a perception that emphasised the inauthenticity and anonymity of social relations with what the phenomenological geographer, Edward Relph, described in the late 1970s as ‘placelessness’ – the distinctive eradication and standardisation of landscapes.  

Amid the global financial collapse of 2008, projects such as Simon Burch’s ‘Under a Grey Sky’, Eoin O’Connaill’s ‘Common Place’ and Jakie Nickerson’s ‘Ten Miles Round’ emerged, which demonstrated a shift in Irish photography from the ‘absence of presence’ to the ‘presence of absence’. Empty landscapes, devoid of people, were a consistent aspect to this work; however, these landscapes were portrayed as imbued with the signs of human presence, marked in the traces of everyday use of landscapes, temporarily suspended in anticipation of the return of human interactions with built or natural environments. These photographs were also accompanied by portraits – some formal in spaces seemingly distinct from the landscapes, others more informal in their depiction of individuals or groups, either in domestic settings or interacting with the everyday social landscapes depicted in the photographs.

Burch’s series, ‘Under a Grey Sky’, for example, focused on the hinterlands of industrial peat harvesting. Photographs of the sometimes dark, brooding peat-scape are accompanied by a series of portraits taken mostly in workspaces or domestic interiors. There is no formal regularity to Burch’s portraits. Some are positioned directly in the centre of the frame, while other subjects are decentred from their domestic environments, shown with pensive expressions. Mandy O’Neill’s 2016 project, ‘Promise’, uses a similar approach. O’Neill carried out ‘Promise’ during a four-year period in Gaelscoil Bharra, in Dublin’s northside, as the school waited for its dilapidated pre-fabs to be replaced by a purpose-built new building. The project combines photographs of the school’s eroding interiors and temporary facades with portraits of schoolchildren. However, unlike Burch’s portraits, O’Neill’s photographs of the pupils have a regularity in the formal organisation of the pictorial space of the portrait, with the subject’s bodies positioned in front of a neutral background – the only exception being the portrait of a young female student in a conformation outfit. As with Burch’s project, O’Neill’s portraits seemingly detach the subjects from the environments that are the focus of the project. However, this strategy avoids place becoming a mere backdrop to the portraits, a sort of scenography against which the body is represented. Instead, the combination of portraits and empty environments – around Irish bog lands, in the case of Burch, or the decrepit, temporary architecture of school buildings documented by O’Neill – requires the viewer to work harder, to look deeper into the relationship between subject and place. This combination of environmental photographs and portraits works contrapuntally – as independent but related counterpoints to one another – asserting the relations of bodies and the sense of place projected in these artworks.

An alternative approach is evident in Linda Brownlee’s 2010 photographic series, ‘Achill’. Brownlee had a long childhood association with Achill Island. For the series, she worked with adolescents on the island, to identify their favourite places and how they wished to be represented in the landscape. In addition to photographs of the Achill landscape, Brownlee photographed subjects from a variety of perspectives that yoke between intimate formal portraits – in which the subjects dominate the pictorial space of the photograph – to images in which the young people are enveloped by the natural environment, or appear as diminutive bodies amidst the vast expanse of horizon that stretches into the distance. Bodily deportment is a significant aspect of Brownlee’s photographs; sometimes all that is visible is the back of someone’s head or a mop of hair blowing in the wind. In other images, the subjects look towards the horizon that is visible to the viewer, or they gaze out to the unseen landscape, beyond the pictorial frame of the photograph. The oscillation between forms of portraiture and bodily poses in the landscape, envision the dynamic relations between body and place; it projects a sense of the landscape, not as a mere backdrop to the formation of adolescent identity, but as a way of showing how their identity is given expression in and through place. 

The continuation of the attention to place in Irish photography – as a dynamic arena of social interaction imbued with presence that shapes everyday identity and experience – is not only evident in recent projects, such as those exhibited in ‘New Irish Works’, but also in more subtle projects, such as Gerry Blake’s ‘Into the Sea’ on the bathing spots along the south Dublin coast, and more politically salient projects, such as Kate Nolan’s ‘Lacuna’ on the border town of Pettigo, County Donegal. As with the aforementioned projects, the concern is not the representation of geographic locations or discrete places, but the social interactions and everyday bodily relations that make place meaningful. All of these projects have involved long-term negotiations and relationships with communities and environments, to envision the deep, subjective entanglements between people and place. They require a more considered analysis on the part of the viewer, to allow the unfolding dynamics of body and place to emerge. This, in turn, reveals how photography can imaginatively envision emotional attachments with the most ordinary commonplaces, in which communities go about everyday life. 

Justin Carville is a lecturer in Historical and Theoretical Studies in Photography at IADT Dún Laoghaire, where he is also Programme Chair of the BA (Hons.) Photography Programme.

Feature Image: Dara McGrath, N25 Douglas, 2003, from the series ‘By The Way’; image © Dara McGrath, courtesy the artist.

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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 in New York and Canyon Cinema in San Francisco) that would build indigenous collections and, in most cases, continue to disseminate artist moving image and experimental film material right up to the present day.

Without the formation of a robust native film culture until later than these international counterparts, Ireland did not follow the same trajectory. It was not until the 1970s and ‘80s that Irish artists and filmmakers began jointly to make moving image work for the gallery and cinema that challenged norms, both formally and politically, and much of this compelling early material –  by artists like James Coleman, Vivienne Dick and ‘First Wave’ filmmakers Thaddeus O’Sullivan and Pat Murphy – was at least initially produced abroad. As a direct consequence of this new approach to filmmaking however, lasting infrastructural change – both for artist and commercial cinema – did come about in Ireland at this time. In 1973, the Arts Council of Ireland added film to the list of artforms that it supported, and in 1981 the Irish Film Board was established, becoming the country’s first state funding agency for cinema.

In the years since, there have been clear indications of the increasingly prominent role played by the moving image in Irish visual culture. As Maeve Connolly has pointed out, Irish artist moving image work has gained greater “visibility and legitimacy” since the 1990s, a fact illustrated, she highlights, by its recurring presence at the São Paulo Biennial (Alanna O’Kelly in 1996, Clare Langan in 2002, Desperate Optimists in 2004) and the Venice Biennale (Jaki Irvine in 1997, Anne Tallentire in 1999, Grace Weir and Siobhán Hapaska in 2001, Gerard Byrne in 2007, Kennedy Browne in 2009 and Jesse Jones in 2017).¹ This same period has also seen a surge in the presentation of artist and experimental film material in Ireland in a cinema context, through a range of platforms including Darklight Festival, the Experimental Film Club and, more recently, the Experimental Film Society, PLASTIK Festival of Artists’ Moving Image and aemi. These diverse initiatives have emerged at least partly in response to the marked rise in production of this material in Ireland in the last twenty or thirty years, a development that mirrors international trends but is all the more striking in an Irish context, given how quickly the scene has evolved.

Because of the pace with which work of this nature has been produced here in a short amount of time, it is all the more pressing to underpin these practices with the resources afforded to artists, students, curators and researchers elsewhere, through organisations like LUX and REWIND in the UK, Lightcone and Collectif Jeune Cinéma in France, Arsenal in Germany, Auguste Orts in Belgium, CFMDC in Canada and many others. In an effort to address at least some of these needs in the first instance, Daniel Fitzpatrick and I founded aemi at the beginning of 2016, an organisation now funded by the Arts Council that supports, advocates for and regularly exhibits moving image work by artists and experimental filmmakers, primarily in a cinema context.

Aemi is one facet of a dynamic, shared ecology of artist and experimental moving image culture in Ireland. Through partnerships and collaborations (with festivals, artists, programmers and other arts organisations) we are keen to strengthen and contribute to a wider, broader infrastructure that is interconnected and mutually enriching. We also recognise that there is a thriving international network and circuit of activity around artist and experimental moving image practice that Ireland-based moving image artists and experimental filmmakers have not historically been in a strong position to engage with. This is not only because we are an island on the periphery of Europe but also because advocates or agents for Irish practice have been in shorter supply. In an effort to upend this frustrating trend, we frequently think about programming as an innate part of our role as a resource organisation. At our screening events, we regularly situate international work alongside films by Irish artists including Vivienne Dick, Sarah Browne, Susan MacWilliam, Saoirse Wall, Moira Tierney, Julie Murray, Aisling McCoy, Tamsin Snow, Alice Rekab, Vanessa Daws and Cliona Harmey. We also invite international curators, programmers and artists to Dublin to present their work in person, while giving them first-hand experience of the busy and diverse scene here. Guests we have previously welcomed include curators Herb Shellenberger, Benjamin Cook and Peter Taylor and artists Mark Leckey, Soda_Jerk, Anne-Marie Copestake, William Raban, Peggy Ahwesh, Lewis Klahr, Tamara Henderson and Sven Augustijnen.

Because it is relatively difficult for Irish artists to gain the same exposure as artists based in the main cultural hubs of Europe or the UK (by virtue of being en route for the stream of arts professionals constantly passing through), we have made a priority of touring aemi programmes abroad, so that we’re not just seeing some of the excellent work that’s being made here ourselves, but also sharing it as much as possible with international audiences. Thanks to funding we have been able to tour aemi programmes abroad for the first time this year, something which forms part of a larger initiative through which we have commissioned two screening programmes, curated and including work by Irish artists Sarah Browne and Vivienne Dick, that we are currently bringing to arts centres and cinemas around Ireland. Aemi is increasing audiences for and critical engagement with this material, through the collective experience of the cinema event, not just in Dublin (where until this year almost all of our screening events had taken place) but around the country more broadly.

The desire to foster a sense of community around this work also informs how we approach the aemi newsletter, which we send out by email to our subscribers every month, highlighting not only events that we are presenting but also festival submission dates, exhibitions and screenings taking place across the country. Signing up for the newsletter is the first step in our aemi affiliate programme which provides Ireland-based moving image artists with access to our free one-to-one advisory sessions, through which we offer feedback or advice around work-in-progress, new work or exhibition strategy. The affiliate programme will develop further in 2020, with the introduction of a regular series of aemi ‘Rough Cut’ events, where artists will also have the opportunity to present newly finished work or work-in-progress to a small group of peers as well as an invited producer, critic, curator or academic who will moderate the event.

Working on aemi has meant that I have had the privilege of viewing a wide range of artist and experimental moving image work produced in Ireland in recent years and this has informed a number of projects and screenings that I have curated in an independent capacity. While the artists I’ve worked with represent just a fraction of what is being made here at present, to some extent they offer insights into the varied landscape of contemporary Irish artist and experimental moving image practice. In autumn 2018, I curated ‘The L-Shape’, an exhibition featuring a new presentation of Going to the Mountain (2015) by Jenny Brady and The Invisible Limb (2014) by Sarah Browne – two moving image works that offered portraits of radically different subjects. In Going to Mountain, Brady’s study of three pre-verbal babies, the viewer is given a perspective divested of sentimentality that provides instead the opportunity to tune into the infants’ physical gestures and movements, often reflected in mirrored surfaces and made to appear unfamiliar through the use of slow motion and syncopated editing. An equally absorbing process of defamiliarisation is also at work in Browne’s elegiac, The Invisible Limb, a film letter addressed to deceased German artist Charlotte Posenenske that considers her work and enigmatic withdrawal from practice as a sculptor in 1968, in relation to Irish stone carver Cynthia Moran, an artist with a very different trajectory whom, it transpires, was born the same year as Posenenske.

The uniquely challenging existence of the artist is also a concern in Laura Fitzgerald’s tragicomic Portrait of a Stone (2018). This was one of the films included in ‘Between Structure and Agency’, a screening of Irish work I curated last year for the Irish Film Institute and Culture Ireland, that will tour the UK with LUX. Fitzgerald’s split screen video piece contrasts footage of her father shot in his native Kerry, obligingly taking direction from his daughter behind the camera, with a steady flow of often humorous on-screen text in which the viewer is addressed as a presumed artist and presented with a multiple choice questionnaire in which every option spelt out is more ludicrous and desperate than the last. Also featured in the ‘Between Structure and Agency’ programme was Doireann O’Malley’s A Dream of Becoming 24 Eyes, 4 Parallel Brains and 360° Vision, a film that reveals a similar level of intimacy and vulnerability as explored in Fitzgerald’s video work, albeit in an altogether different tone. Shot on Super 8 and 16mm film, and drawing on material from the artist’s personal archive, the title references the anatomy of the box jellyfish and expresses, as O’Malley recently described in an interview for Vdrome, “the faint hope or dream of transcending the limits of human embodiment and perception”.² Likewise Bea McMahon’s sublime silent 8mm Film of Octopuses (2013) – which featured in a screening I presented at the IFI in 2017, entitled ‘As We May Think’ – uses the camera to offer or imagine a vision not of an octopus, but instead an impression of what an octopus might perceive. These contemporary Irish film works then each demonstrate an impressive culture of practice that is experimental, both technically and conceptually – a culture that is deeply rewarding to engage with, as a programmer and film curator, and deserving of wider attention.

Alice Butler is a film curator, writer and co-director of aemi, a Dublin-based, Arts Council-funded organisation that supports and regularly exhibits moving image work by artists and experimental filmmakers.

Notes
¹ Maeve Connolly, ‘Archiving Irish and British Artists’ Video: A Conversation between Maeve Connolly and REWIND researchers Stephen Partridge and Adam Lockhart’, MIRAJ 5.1&2, 2016, p.208. See: maeveconnolly.net 
² Doireann O’Malley in conversation about A Dream of Becoming 24 Eyes, 4 Parallel Brains and 360° Vision for the online exhibition platform, Vdrome. See: vdrome.org/doireann-omalley

Feature Image: Doireann O’Malley, A Dream of Becoming 24 Eyes, 4 Parallel Brains and 360° Vision, 2013, Super 8 and 16mm transferred to video, stereo sound; video still courtesy of the artist.

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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, alternatively, that I’m doing it all the time. My 2010 Visual Culture PhD – titled: Atherton on Atherton, An Examination of the Self-Reflexive Role of Language in Critically Examining Visual Art Practice Through a Consideration of Kevin Atherton’s Work – was intended to contest the relationship between the written and the visual. It was also intended to challenge the notion of visual art research. The prominent theme in my work over the last fifty years has been identity. 

Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones: We don’t have a tidy research-to-outcome approach. We have constantly to reconcile two individual perspectives, each with its own complexities. We allow for some disorder, and a lot of ‘working out’ or testing of half-formed propositions. One of our projects – ‘Tactically Yours’ at Butler Gallery (23 June to 29 July 2007) – was partly about this process. Typically, we begin with a site or object that has sparked our joint interest (such as a plot of land, or a destroyed factory). We usually find that we have different investments in the object, but we establish enough common ground to devise, say, a durational image, or a series of performative gestures, specific to it. Our early energy thus goes into action that produces something new (usually recordings of some kind). We interrogate the emerging material with reference to what could be called a joint body of knowledge. Either one of us might have to incorporate elements that seem counter-intuitive, or antagonistic. For instance, we’ve each had to question our individual senses of national and cultural belonging – our own nostalgias. Many ideas do not survive in their original form. For exhibition we want, primarily, to create an involving field of affect, to engage the viewer in a thought and felt response to the ideas that have occupied us, whilst making the work. 

JL: Can you outline some of your technical requirements – such as access to production equipment or editing facilities – and how these impact on the format of your films?

KA: I worked out fairly early on in my career that my position as a film maker was in front of the camera lens, rather than behind it. Since 2014, I have been making videos that include some of my early films and videos. Re-entering my earlier works can sometimes feel like standing on a moving Möbius strip, where the past and present intertwine and become very complicated. I feel that as the maker of some early examples of ‘Expanded Cinema’, I set certain things in motion in the 1970s, and that I’m catching up with them again now. This means that I need a good technical person, both to record and edit what I do, but also someone who ‘gets it’ and ‘gets me’.

FH and AS: Our video and audio production is in-house and digital. As artists who worked with tape in hired edit suites, we really enjoy having a fluid, ongoing moving-image practice that’s not reliant on up-front production funds. However, our finished works are highly dependent on their manner of exhibition. It’s necessary for us to be at least as engaged with technologies of planning and installation as with video/sound editing. Our latest exhibition ‘The Land That…’ at The MAC, Belfast (12 April – 7 July) involved nine video feeds, with as many screens, multiple audio feeds, objects and automated lighting. We had to think in terms of parallel timelines, and degrees of synchronisation and slippage, as we sought to animate multiple spaces without the whole becoming confusing to the senses. Whilst we were editing video and sound, we used a virtual 3D model to visualise the whole work in the gallery. In the final phase, we drew on the commitment of the exemplary team at the MAC to realise in reality what we’d modelled in virtual space. 

JL: Each of you has films that feature in the LUX collection. How important are international archives and distribution agencies in the promotion of artists’ moving image practices and discourses? From an archival perspective, how have you dealt with film formats and technologies becoming outmoded over the years? 

KA: In the 1970s, I used London Video Arts (who became LUX) to distribute my work and, more unusually in the1980s, to produce it. Now LUX has copies of these and other more recent works of mine in their collection. I have been in a couple of group shows at the Whitechapel Gallery and the ICA in recent years where the work was sourced from LUX but despite this, I don’t feel that they actively promote me. If a curator was pursuing a particular theme, then I like to think that LUX might point him or her towards my work. The future proofing of time-based work isn’t an issue restricted to technical concerns. For work to prove to be prescient, its subject matter will determine its relevance in the future. 

FH and AS: Even when they’re legitimated on grounds of inclusiveness, archives can still be used very selectively. If the discussion of ‘archives and distribution’ includes ‘history and exposure’, then it also involves power and representation around artistic culture more generally. Do the rules of inclusion/exclusion that apply to art in general also apply to moving image? Should it be a special case? On a practical note, we don’t know of an archive that’s really met the challenge of representing multi-screen installation works after exhibition. Further, if the focus is on mere media-specificity (it’s film, it’s video) or the technical issue of ‘future-proofing’, then the detailed cultural context around the archived work can be neglected. As far as we can tell, having work in archives has not brought us much exposure, in terms of exhibition. Our work is discussed in academic writing, often on the basis of its concerns and effects, as much as its being film or video. To respond to that kind of interest, we try to maintain our own archive, to keep our works accessible in digital form. 

JL: Perhaps you could discuss your current work and any future plans? 

KA: Last year I collaborated with the Museo internazionale delle marionette Antonio Pasqualino in Palermo on a puppet version of my on-going video/performance piece, In Two Minds (1978–2019). I worked with a skilled puppet-master at the museum who made two marionettes for the project. These puppets of me at the age of 27 and me now as an old man, are dressed identically but the younger one still smokes. Having had the two puppets made to be in a new video, I’m now interested in using them to make my work for me. I am eager to see what ideas they might come up with.

FH and AS: ‘That Land That…’ at the MAC is the culmination of several years’ work. It can be reconfigured for other spaces. We intend a compilation film of works made “in and of” Ireland: Overnight Sensation (Belfast, 2001), Ex Machina (Carlow, 2006) The Land That… (Donegal, 2010–15). That would be for cinema screening, with surround sound. Meanwhile, Frances is embarking on new studio work, involving large drawings with related texts; Andrew is working on twin and single-screen video works, audio and musical works, and an online collaboration with Derry-based artists Locky Morris and Conor McFeely. 

Kevin Atherton’s video work has been exhibited in key historical exhibitions, such as ‘Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963-1987’, MUMOK, Vienna 2010. His work, In Two Minds (1978–2014), is in the collection at IMMA.

Frances Hegarty and Andrew Stones each have individual practices spanning several decades and have worked collaboratively since 1997.

Featured Image: Frances Hegarty & Andrew Stones, ‘The Land That…’, 2019, installation view; image © and courtesy of the artists.

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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 preliminary course, which emphasised starting anew and experimentating with materials. For this, my main medium is the photogram. I place objects on light sensitive paper in the darkroom, shining light onto them to create traces, rather than photographs of the objects. Geometrical forms and materials associated with the Bauhaus architecture and the medium of photography are my subject matter. I am looking to understand the grammar of materials. 

Darn Thorn: For me, the idea of hybrid practice means utilising particular media, as a means to issue a provocation or elicit a response in the viewer. My work often engages with historical subject matter: ideas of utopia and the impact of cultural trauma. By combining traditional and contemporary processes in my practice, ambiguity is created, where the image is neither ‘old’ nor ‘new’ but something less classifiable – perhaps even something mutant. Also, for this reason, the choice of media I employ changes with each project. 

Róisín White: I describe my practice as primarily lens-based, using archival and found photography, combined with collage and sculptural techniques. Photography is the jumping-off point – be it images I have created, or images I have found in magazines, online auctions, or in life situations. Each circumstance of finding sparks something different in the work. I’m never satisfied when it is ‘just a photograph’. I use collage to change and intensify the image. I reproduce images on different papers and materials, to see how they respond to these surfaces. I am looking for supports that give an interesting edge, once torn. I like to print multiples, rip them up, move and fix them. This intimate and tactile engagement with the materiality of images is vital to my working process. I am trying to expand my practice into sculpture, by incorporating photography with 3D objects, without it just being an image on an object. 

PS: Expanded photographic practice highlights how images act – how they are created and consumed; how they can be altered by networks of dissemination, storage and access; while also addressing the power structures that intersect via images. By taking on a performance-based role, images can transcend categories, or render them permeable. How do you approach image-making within these porous boundaries?

RL: My practice connects different territories of the medium. Although I work mainly in the darkroom, I am not puritanical with regard to analogue photography. I scan my negatives and photograms to make larger digital prints than my body physically allows. I use whatever strategies the work needs. My interest is in leaving questions unresolved, while allowing active exchange between work and viewer. For this reason, I have been printing on aluminum and using reflective surfaces in installations, which reference the viewer’s gaze and bring attention to the image structure in unexpected ways. The photographic print as sculptural object is another expansion I am working with. In the darkroom, I apply the standard fold of an architectural blueprint to a sheet of photo paper. I unfold the paper and light it with a torch. What is produced is a representation of itself. It is evidence of the situation of its own making, nothing else.

DT: I think it’s this very capacity – this other life that expanded practice creates for the image – that interests me. One power structure that can limit the remit of the image is the institutional categorisation of photography and what constitutes expanded practice. For example, there are excellent institutions and publications here in Ireland that focus on photography, but don’t really have the scope for moving image or installation content. Expanded practice can eschew the parameters of the conventional photographic series. It doesn’t always work in the photobook format and, in many cases, needs to be encountered as an installation. 

RW: I am benefiting from these permeable boundaries. However, I still dread that question: “so what kind of photography do you do?” My practice is so varied, it can be hard to explain as an ‘elevator pitch’. It is rarely a single image work. When I work on projects, a central pillar of research will inform the production of all of the artwork. I may work on sculptures for a few weeks, then go back to images, and see how they can cross-pollinate. This process-based approach to image-making is liberating and productive. While most of the work in the studio never sees the light of the gallery, or even my website, I enjoy being able to share snapshots of my process on Instagram. This has allowed me to test pieces and share behind-the-scenes shots with people from all over the world. Equally, I get insights into their work. While many things I share do end up being exhibited, there are versions of work that only survive on Instagram. I use the platform as a public notebook that is open to critique. I find it a useful way of keeping my peers in the loop with my practice.

PS: Images (and our relations to them) are entangled in a complex array of competing and affecting influences. Can you discuss how your work takes shape and manifests?

RL: My works offer viewers insights into my inquisitiveness regarding photographic processes. My interest in photograms is that they only concern themselves as a surface, object and material. A new approach to my photogram work is drawing geometric shapes with graphite onto the surface of exposed and processed semi-matt photographic paper. I then apply a wet paintbrush, changing the surface of the graphite and the print again. It reflects light differently, depending on the angle of view. Like my previous works printed directly onto aluminum, what a viewer sees depends on where they are positioned in relation to the work. 

DT: In the theatre, a director can make the decision to use a conventional stage, where the action happens behind a proscenium arch that operates as a frame for the drama. In this situation the audience is a passive observer. In photography, the parallel is the photobook or the framed image. As a display format, both can work well, mostly because they conform to our idea of what a photograph is. However, what if the work demands us to activate the audience, proposing that they have a different physical interaction? What if we consider the photographic image in three-dimensional space? I think that this has influenced me to use unconventional media – wallpaper, commercially-made vinyl banners, 3D glass etching, and so on – as a way of questioning our assumptions about what a photographic image can be.

RW: I have recently been working with the idea of how an image can be built. I design and construct sculptures, with the intention of photographing them, so that the photographs act like subjects or stage sets. I am interested in how this can create surreal and uncanny images. While the viewer may just see a ‘photograph’, what takes place with the image-making is so much more. Perhaps it is the physical labour required in creating an image that is rewarding; or knowing that a photograph consists of more than meets the eye. 

PS: Photographs are part of our everyday exchanges and interactions, produced frequently and habitually on devices that are almost part of us. How do you see your practice operating amidst this abundance of democratic image-making? 

RL: Photography is mostly understood as a medium for documenting the external world. However, I use the medium self-reflexively to express internal abstract feelings that come through making strategies – fragility, uncertainty and other emotional resonances. My practice investigates historical discourse, tracing the impact of photography on our interpretation of images, and on our lived experiences. I use the process of making photograms to disassemble the photographic process into its component parts: light, time, light sensitive surface and object. I am questioning how we perceive what we recognise, when we look at photographic surfaces. 

DT: By using the pseudonym, Darn Thorn, the idea of authorship in my work is automatically called into question. It’s a joke, made at my own expense, about the notion of ‘artist as singular genius’. Technology has made the production of high-resolution images easier; what was previously only possible with specialist equipment and professional training is now, at least theoretically, accessible to many. In our present moment, news media prefers amateur footage to the photo essay. In this context, I wonder what a conventional photo series has to say? Self-published photo books are a democratising phenomenon; but there is a tendency for the associated photo festivals and publications to lean towards an editorial approach. They often promote a type of photography that shares the continuity of narrative that we see in photojournalism. I respond to these considerations playfully, by making works that only survive one installation, or are too awkward to be easily sold. I want the audience to question what is going on. In this sense, there is a performative element to my practice. By making large-scale images of monumental architecture or landscapes, I’m proposing something slightly absurd to the viewer. These works carry a sense of drama and significance but are deliberately hard to decode. They invoke ideas of the sublime, partly invoked ironically: How can something so big and apparently significant be so hard to read? 

RW: My practice draws on pre-internet printed matter, from a time when images needed to be an object to exist. I use the abundance of printed images that exist from a past when we used to print our photos to share – or when we bought magazines, newspapers and illustrated encyclopaedias, to see other places and things from around the world. What attracts me to found images is the appeal of different aesthetics, as well as the lure of a time when I was not present – with these images becoming a repository of meaning. With the advent of camera phones, we are now collectively producing more images per day than we used to in a year. These digital images are so fragile. They exist on devices that are not built to last more than five years. I wonder how will we find images in twenty or fifty years’ time?

Roseanne Lynch is currently based in Leipzig making work for a group show at Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Australia, and a solo show at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris.

Darn Thorn works with photography and installation. Recent exhibitions include EVA International 2018 and ‘2116’ at the Glucksman Gallery (Cork) and Broad Art Museum (USA). He teaches at CIT Crawford College of Art and Design.

Róisín White is a visual artist based in Dublin. She works in lens-based media and found materials, with recent exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Photography of Ireland, and the Finnish Museum of Photography. 

Pádraig Spillane is an artist, curator and educator, teaching at CIT Crawford College of Art and Design. He works with photography, appropriation and object-based assemblages, with work featuring in an upcoming group show at The Complex, Dublin.

Featured Image: Darn Thorn, Aggiornamento, 2018, still from 16mm film, black & white; courtesy of the artist.

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Hang Tough Gallery, Dublin
20 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 that everything has to be located somewhere, ‘location’ is a rather broad area of interest, particularly with regards to photography – a medium that freezes and preserves location, while documenting all the stuff that’s contained within it. However, the exhibition text then ‘un-fixes’ this tentative conceptual framework by going on to state that: “Place becomes unimportant, as a collective atmosphere takes hold that blurs the lines of real and imagined…” This evasion makes critically evaluating the show as a cohesive entity very difficult. Visually or philosophically, I did not feel these works to be in communication with one another, and the press release only served to highlight this. 

That’s perhaps part of the reason why Ciarán Óg Arnold – with both the greatest volume of images (numbering in the twenties) and the least volunteering of information (every work was titled ‘Fever Dreams’) – was the most successful. His work was presented slightly apart from the other groupings, in a back part of the gallery that leads into a workspace. Arguably, this released the viewer from trying to force connections where there weren’t any, with Óg Arnold’s work being physically, conceptually and philosophically distinguished. An artist of compelling vision, he so effectively built a world of composites (hectic, hellish and halcyon glimpses of boobs, scars, flowers, toilet cisterns and worn-out mod-cons) that it allowed the viewer to temporarily exit the realm the rest of the works were affixed to. 

The six works by the exhibition’s curator, Johnny Savage, were also blithely and ruthlessly successful in doing the lion’s share of the show’s atmospheric heavy lifting. Savage’s photographic prints – such as N7, Grave and Window – were literal illustrations of their respective titles. These images convey a people-less, post-location diminishment – something American writer, Maggie Nelson, might describe as the “fundamental impermanence of all things”.² The photographs depict an existentially jaded and faded world, one beleaguered by the labour of manifestation (both as earth and as image), the continuing struggle of subsistence having “bleached out their blues”.³ There was a horse in one image – but it felt like the last horse on earth, as if some kind of dystopian zombie-bot had documented its faded glory, using a camera made of repurposed human eyes. 

Cáit Fahey presented a pleasant and subdued palette of flowers, interiors and building edges. The work, Kind Graffiti – which shows finger markings traced across the surface of an anonymous structure – offered a particularly satisfying gentleness. The quandary of presenting commercial-style photography in contemporary art contexts – and how to critically assess works that are perhaps themselves not invested in criticality – was most prominent when viewing the works of both Rich Gilligan and Megan Doherty, artists who, one hazards, could, or do, produce professionally and highly effectively for streetwear labels or youth-orientated commercial outlets. These were serviceable, modern images of urban scenes and the young people inhabiting them; but they did not appear bound to contemporary art discourse. However, one of Doherty’s images, titled Dissonance – which shows a young man sitting on a toilet lid seemingly getting his head examined – had a brutal delicacy, reminiscent of American photographer Nan Goldin’s unflinching depictions of intimacy. 

Mostly everything (though, fittingly, little of Óg Arnold) is available to view or buy online through Hang Tough’s website – a location where much of the work could’ve perhaps existed solely with a greater sense of meaning and purpose. 

Lily Cahill is an artist and writer based in Dublin. She is a co-editor of Critical Bastards Magazine. 

Notes
¹ ‘FIX’ press release (see hangtoughgallery.com).
² Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Jonathan Cape: London, 2009).
³ Ibid. 

Feature Image: Johnny Savage, Verge, 2019; courtesy of artist and Hang Tough Gallery.

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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 Flavin; Robert Morris’s 1960 sculpture, Column; and Tony Smith’s career-changing epiphany on the New Jersey Turnpike, which led him to minimalist art. Other works assume modular structures of indefinite duration. Taking cues from the serial qualities of minimalism, In Our Time (2017) takes place in a radio studio. Using the modular structure of commercial radio broadcasting as temporal framework, the film is played in sync with the opening hours of the gallery. 

Byrne graduated from NCAD in 1991, just as ‘media art’ was about to experience a monumental shift from analogue to digital. As we discuss the evolution of Byrne’s working methods, he mentions a range of formats, including 16mm, VHS (and VHS-C), Hi8, Betacam SP, MiniDV, SD digital video, HD, 4k, and beyond. With this expansive collection of material, comes questions of storage and preservation. For Byrne, this has generally involved fastidious processes of digitisation and archiving, so even works created on analogue tapes (and kept safely in physical storage), also now exist on hard drives, making them more readily accessible. Giving a ballpark figure, Byrne estimates that he has over 100 hard drives of material. When I ask whether he has any advice for other artists on how they should digitally archive their work, he cautiously states: “Well, first thing I would say is, if you want to get advice on that, an artist is probably not the best person to ask. You’re better off asking somebody who manages data […] It’s not an art question. What I do for myself, is that I label all my hard drives in a very systematic way. They’re given a number, which goes up sequentially. The label also states the size of the drive and whether it’s an A or a B drive – the idea being that the B drives are backups of the A drives, so I usually try to have drives in pairs, if possible. And ideally, of course, you have a third backup. I also use a piece of cataloguing software called NeoFinder, which scans hard drives and makes an inventory of what’s on the drive. That catalogue is then accessible without the drive being connected. So if you’re looking for a specific file, you can search across all of the catalogues and find out which drives it’s on.”

Byrne has been working with non-linear digital video editing programmes since the mid-‘90s, when he was a postgraduate student at Parsons School of Design in New York. Then he was working with early versions of Adobe Premiere and Avid Media Composer; now he works with programmes like Final Cut. The project files for these programmes are equally important to archive, so that old video edits can be accessed for re-exporting and upgrading. However, Byrne concedes that, unfortunately, “software makers have no interest, or minimal commitments, to the idea of backwards accessibility”. This essentially means that unless you have a specific version of a piece of software (and the correct operating system on which the programme will run) you won’t be able to access that project anymore. Byrne gets around this situation by using hard drives to clone certain operating systems that will run specific pieces of older software, such as Final Cut 7. This clone drive can then be booted up from a computer, when he needs to access something. But this isn’t the end of the problem: “it’s also inevitably going to mean archiving physical computers, because it’s going to get to the point where certain operating systems are just not supported by newer computers. So, the only way you’ll be able to boot from them is by having an older computer… It’s farcical that you’re trying to save access to a file and that means you have to archive a whole computer.” Byrne has been dealing with archival problems like these for the past 10 years or so. With many of his major works in international collections, he’s been fortunate enough to discuss these issues with digital conservationists working in museums around the world. Digital conservation is becoming a professionalised field, with outside consultants advising both private collections and publicly-funded galleries on how to tackle the problems of storing and accessing digital formats. But Byrne admits: “In all the conversations that I’ve had in my travels, I’ve realised nobody really has definitive answers […] I don’t think anybody can do anything more than be reactive and try to make good choices.” 

These conservation challenges aren’t just limited to the digital domain. As well as guarding against the obsoletion of computer software, installation hardware also needs to be ‘future-ready’. Byrne’s installations require meticulous levels of thought and design, incorporating both bespoke software and specialist hardware. Byrne’s collaborator, Sven Anderson – who works tirelessly as the primary technical designer for Byrne’s projects – has been a lynchpin in devising these systems. However, with the necessary complexity required to playback the works, a number of potential problems can arise. Firstly, the component parts of his installations, and the fact that they can modulate in structure, duration and layout, lead to challenges when finalising the works for collections. There is a process of “delimiting the work in a very material way” that needs to take place before it can be handed over to a museum. Secondly, hardware, files and other interconnecting parts pertaining to an artwork needs to remain accessible and functional in years to come. Re-showing works that are less than even a decade old, can become problematic, if hardware breaks down and needs to be replaced. And thanks to a rising culture of ‘planned obsolescence’, replacement might be the only viable option, when things are impossible to repair. File formats can also become unsupported if new hardware is introduced. Such dilemmas can spiral, unless all aspects are carefully thought through. Indeed, the creation of these works involves a stringent period of development and testing by Byrne and Anderson. The first major project they worked on together was A thing is a hole is a thing it is not (2010). They decided that the best way for the work to be delivered to collections was as a “ready-to-go, verified system”. As Byrne recalls, this was a huge amount of work, with Anderson writing a 50-page manual to accompany the artwork, outlining all aspects of the installation, from set-up and running, to troubleshooting. 

For all the flexibility and increased convenience that digital technologies afford, they also introduce a set of challenges. “Migration between formats is actually a very natural quality of the digital environment we live in – that media can migrate between formats fluidly, and fluently – that’s kind of anathema to museums. At least in a historical sense, a lot of orthodox thinking around museums is an anxiety to change in relation to a work. To lock it down.” While custom-made presentation systems are currently only used by a minority of artists, they are becoming more common, as technology becomes more increasingly accessible. The role of museum collections in preserving these pieces of hardware is therefore likely to become a prescient issue, with Byrne concluding that: “As museum conservators’ knowledge of media and the technical side of media art advances, I think they’ll have more specific questions for artists.” 

Gerard Byrne is an artist and lecturer based in Dublin. He is represented by Lisson Gallery, Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm and Kerlin Gallery.
gerardbyrne.com

Christopher Steenson is Production Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. He also works as a studio assistant for Gerard Byrne.
christophersteenson.com

Feature Image: Gerard Byrne, A thing is a hole is a thing it is not, 2010, installation view, Lismore Castle Arts; courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake.

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CCA Derry~Londonderry
8 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 in them. ‘Fast Slow Fast’ at CCA takes work by Catriona Leahy, Darren Nixon and Joan Alexander, aspiring to a visual cipher for critical considerations of time, as exchanged and demarked by aesthetic gestures.

The mainstay of Joan Alexander’s practice, as represented here, is the ‘Shadow Dial’ series. With drawing, photography and printmaking, Alexander captures changing light, cast upon surfaces by the movement of the sun. On the occasion of Midsummer, Alexander has produced Shadow Dial, a site-specific, spatial drawing that charts the casting of daylight through CCA’s windows, upon the floor, walls and the building’s facade. The rectangular imprints of light are outlined in white chalk, cumulatively connecting a faint lattice of past tenses. There is no singularly presented Shadow Dial; a similar methodology is documented repeatedly, in various wall-mounted prints all around the small space, with the live-work disruptively sprawled between them. The repetition isn’t the conceptual locus of the work, and it isn’t the charting of sunlight that marks the passing of time, but rather the ephemeral actions of the artist.

Catriona Leahy’s body of work is inspired by a residency in Genk, a former coal-mining region in Belgium. Leahy excavates the region’s natural and built environments through modular printing and photography, repeatedly spreading large images across grids of modular parts. A counterpoint to Shadow Dial is the pronounced black of Leahy’s Rhizome, a large floor drawing that delicately maps the subterranean mines of Genk in coal dust. The instability and fragility of the medium represents not only the impermanence of coal as a resource, but of coalmining as an industry, heightened in the context of climate change. The precarious materiality of the drawing symbolises fading identity: wear-and-tear has blurred lines and frayed edges here and there, presaging the eventual dissolution of the artwork. Rhizome critically mines notions of identity, as measured by fragile, time-limited materials and concepts.

Dislocate is an off-site project by Darren Nixon, in a disused shop in Derry’s Richmond Centre. Nixon has a fluid, ambiguous practice operating in the ‘expanded-field’ of painting, which is to say, applying a painterly logic of permanent, highly individual gestures to a mixed-media practice. He works collaboratively with two dancers, Janie Doherty and Lydia Swift, in sequence over two weeks, choreographing movements amid projected backdrops and monochrome patterned objects. The movements are recorded, then cumulatively threaded through new performances as the work progresses. At the time of writing, Nixon was in the collaborative phase of the project but was working toward a final phase, when he will continue the work alone. If the premise of the work is to obfuscate responsibility, the decision to perform alone as the ‘future tense’ relents from this linear methodology, vacillating more provocatively than a well-laid plan. Dislocate thus suggests presence as an analogue to tense; agency as that to duration. The synonymic splicing of tense and authorship are an elegant metaphor for the conditioning of an artwork by its speculative exchanges.

‘Fast Slow Fast’ cumulatively graduates the artist’s presences: between Rhizome, Midsummer Shadow Dial, and Dislocate is an analogue to past, present, and future (respectively) in the circumstances of production. Returning to the promotional images I produce during my civilised hours, it could be argued that, for their intended audience, they are alienated, instantaneous things. Art has the capacity to invert this process of temporal estrangement, promoting value in the act of viewing… eventually.

Kevin Burns is an artist and writer based in Derry.

Feature Image: Darren Nixon, Dislocate, 2019, off-site project for CCA Derry~Londonderry as part of ‘Fast Slow Fast’ (8 June – 10 August); photograph courtesy of the artist and CCA.

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Gallery of Photography / National Photographic Archive, Dublin
21 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 of Ireland – the curation emphasises a salient connection with the modernist aesthetic. Spare, muscular aspects of rural and ancient Ireland are the dominant type, in a show which accommodates many other threads, of a more anecdotal nature. 

As a sculptor, these subjects seem to have attracted Hooker O’Malley. Fully aware of the acceptance of photography as a fine art discipline – she met the prominent modernist photographer, Paul Strand, in 1933 – the medium had an auxiliary role within her multidisciplinary practice. As a procedure for framing what is seen, it mediated her dynamic curiosity and urge to capture. Baldly preoccupied with their subjects, there is a connection between her photography of the late 1930s and the influence of the smartphone on contemporary experience. More than a precursor to reflection or display, the very process of establishing a shot augments perception with a new way of attending to phenomena. 

Fairy hills, carved bog lands, Neolithic tombs: these subjects themselves register sculptural qualities and are powerfully evocative of time. Hooker O’Malley saw in them – and in the wider horizon of the natural world – something transcendent and mystical. In her poem of 1975, Edward Weston, Photographer, she writes: “those who study reverently/ Observing nature, it marks them all, as creviced rocks by sea”. The first-floor atrium space of the Gallery of Photography features multiple large, black-and-white monoliths, stone walls and tiered, rolling land, flush together in repetitive, framed conjunctions. This prompts consideration of these subjects and their unquestioned value in relation to the visual language which is founded upon them. Alloyed to a modernist formalism, forceful, harmonious and uncluttered, the artist’s apparent inspiration, found in land and ancient culture, yields a visual rhetoric of vigorous but elusive spirituality. 

This is somewhat alleviated where the pictures feature people. Even when teetering distantly on a precipitous shelf of cut bog, human forms defy an insistent suggestion of harmony with land, nature or milieu. Blowing up the discordance are a series of largescale prints onto the gallery wall, showing a brisk turf-cutting competition set low in the ground. Men’s bodies appear slanted, absorbed in action, signalling private experiences we cannot know. Many more images of west Mayo, taken in 1938, are distinguished by similar human recalcitrance. Prints of a regatta taking place off Clare Island are dominated by an undulating cliff face, dramatically separating the boats upon the water from gathered onlookers, who seem to decorate the coastal sweep with their peaked caps. Meanwhile, on the beach at the Carrowmore Races, the crowd spills in the direction of the waves, with riders on horseback dancing by. The camera is generally shown their backs.

Remembering that Hooker O’Malley was a relatively privileged outsider attempting to harvest lofty inspiration from these vignettes – she was unsatisfied with life in Mayo¹ – we are conscious of occupying a comparable perspective on such images. We mine these material indexes of real lives for something quaint, unfathomable or appalling, mingled in a potent aesthetic hit. Later Kodachrome portraits – in which compositions are more subtle, lacking the mystical architecture of pattern and landscape – offer arguably more effective approaches to the dovetailing of people and place. Highlights include a shot, taken from below, of her friend, the writer Mary Lavin, at the artist’s Ballsbridge mews in 1975. Another image from the same period shows a woman and baby seated on a train, a plain example of what is everyday and fascinatingly enigmatic. 

Danny Kelly is an artist based in Dublin.

Notes
¹ Roy Foster ‘Hillside Men’, London Review of Books, 16 July 1998. 

Feature Image: Helen Hooker O’Malley, Islanders watching the Regatta, Clare Island, Co. Mayo, 1938; image courtesy of Gallery of Photography Ireland and National Photographic Archive.

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Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast
6 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 Korea over a number of years. Contained within the images is a gentle, nuanced critique of the regime, which the artist explains as an attempt at finding authenticity concealed beneath propagandist appearance. This subtlety is a necessary product of his awareness of state-sanctioned lines which must not be crossed.

The installation is dominated by large prints pasted directly onto the gallery walls, with smaller, framed photographs between. The large works – interior shots of the Korean Revolution Museum – generate complex viewing, the audience initially unsure where the gallery ends and the photographs begin.

The first we see is a room dominated by Kim Il-sung’s staff car – an acid yellow Russian Pobeda, whose dents, scratches and signs of wear are heightened by the shiny perfection of the marble plinth on which it stands. Behind are the first of the many photographs-within-photographs included in the show. In this case, three photographs, in ugly gold frames with red fabric surrounds, of Kim giving inspirational speeches – two with the ubiquitous North Korean ideological-happiness smile, and one with a more serious note. In a nearby case is displayed the military coat he wears in this latter photograph, with a quotation from the man situated between, producing an incongruous nod to Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs.

In another of these large photographs, a museum guide raises her hand to a portrait of the young Kim, while behind her are four black-and-white prints of paintings showing him educating the entranced workers, who are gathered around him. This is standard fare in the Stalinist/Zhdanovist “socialist realist” form, in which the wisdom of the leader is absorbed by all those fortunate enough to find themselves in his presence. Herein lies the reply to the question posed by the exhibition’s umbrella title.

This compositional convention is found in another large, pasted print. Within is an oversized painting, in which Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are surrounded by young children, gazing happily and snuggling up against the patriarchs. This is again typical socialist realism but, because it is a watercolour, it is tonally muted and looks more like an illustration for Matthew 19:14 in a children’s bible: “But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

This is the strongest trompe l’oeil of all, with a statue and a guide half concealed by pillars on either side. It brought to mind Mantegna’s fresco, The Court of Gonzaga, with its ambiguity between painting and surrounding architectural features. Illusion of this kind can often be problematic, as the loss of oneself in the tableau – and the excessive empathy this engenders – restricts the capacity for critique among its audience. Chancel, however, negates this by re-flattening the remaining wall space with grey-green, butting against the three-dimensionality of the imagery. This juxtaposition of real two-dimensional space and theatrical space returns to the audience its interpretive role.

Hanging on these in-between spaces are a number of smaller framed photographs of people engaging in various aspects of Korean society, including work, play, sport, music and the military. Here we see the North Korea that our own western propaganda conceals – the individuality that pushes its way through the authoritarian uniformity imposed by the oppressive state. These are real people with authentic emotions that peek through the masks they’re expected to wear (including the haughty disdain on the faces of two Olympic athletes, whose arms are linked in genuine solidarity).

This show is a class act – such a pity it was required to share a gallery with the prosaic and the downright disastrous.

Colin Darke is an artist based in Belfast.
colindarke.co.uk

Feature image: Philippe Chancel, from the series ‘Kim Happiness’, photograph © Philippe Chancel, courtesy Golden Thread Gallery.

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