Things do not tend to happen by chance. Or at the least things about the DeLorean. Two consecutive events about it have been brought to our attention recently: Sean Lynch exhibition ‘DeLorean: Progress Report’, just closed recently at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, and Duncan Campbell’s documentary film ‘Make It New John‘ showing at Tramway, Glasgow till the 14th of March. Campbell’s is a co-commission by Glasgow’s Tramway in partnership with The Chisenhale Gallery, London, the Artists Film and Video Umbrella and the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo.
Make it new John is made up of four fragmentary and often contrary sections. Campbell deliberately opted to end his possibly unreliable versions of events prior to the drugs sting that DeLorean was later acquitted of as his company faced financial ruin. ‘I’m not trying to be deliberately obscure,’ Campbell insists, ‘but you have to tailor what you do so you’re not dictated to by a framework. What I’m doing is more about montaging a story that was almost Shakespearian, where what’s important is what you leave out.’ The List
But as it happens this is more than just ‘putting former headline-makers back into the limelight‘. And it is very interesting to see these different approaches and how each one of them has used the DeLorean to speak about personal recurrent concerns, both framed within a historic research. I am looking forward to see Campbell’s work. Though, having listen to Sean Lynch speak about his work, his research based practice, and the context of this work, I am certain that Campbell’s work would not be able to deliver the same punch. Aw, life is tough.
‘DeLorean: Progress Report’, Sean Lynch
Sean Lynch’s photographs, installations and publications continue to investigate and bring to attention understandings and representations of history. His first solo exhibition at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery takes as a starting point the bankruptcy and subsequent aftermath of the DeLorean car factory, which operated in Dunmurry, outside Belfast, from 1981-2. A series of photographs trace a path taken by the artist throughout 2009 to seek out and find the location of the tooling once used to make the body of the car, essentially the formgivers that gave DeLorean its famous profile. Sold off and dispersed to scrapyards through the country in1984, it was rumoured that the tooling was purchased by fishermen to be used as anchors. Lynch eventually located them at the bottom of Galway Bay, where crabs and lobsters now live in the coral around the nooks and shapes that once pressed out stainless steel panels of the car’s exterior. Also, presented for the first time is ongoing work to produce sections of a DeLorean by handmade rather than industrial means.
‘Make It New John’, Duncan Campbell
For his first major solo exhibition in Scotland, the highly regarded Glasgow-based artist Duncan Campbell (born 1972, Dublin) will present his latest film piece, a co-commission by Tramway in partnership with Chisenhale Gallery, London; the Artists’ Film and Video Umbrella and theModel Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo. The film looks back over the life of John DeLorean and the car plant he set up in Belfast. Combining archive news material with newly-filmed footage, the film considers DeLorean’s own personal rise and fall as echoed in the example of the impressively stylish but technically flawed DMC12 sports car that was produced at the factory. The commission will continue the artists’ exploration of documentary film – started in his earlier films Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003) and the acclaimed Bernadette (2008) – where what constitutes reality and truth in such films becomes a shifting notion.
A great video interview about the film with Campbell at the Telegraph.
And more on The List.
Opening: November 25, 6.30pm. Exhibition continues until January 24 2010.
The Gallery of Photography is proud to present the premiere showing of a new body of work by Jackie Nickerson, one of the foremost photographic artists working today. In ‘Ten Miles Round’, Jackie Nickerson (Winner of the AIB Prize) explores the predominately rural community around her home in coastal Co Louth. In large-scale colour landscapes and portraits, she builds a psychological portrait of her community. The landscapes challenge conventional notions of the picturesque, offering instead a more engaged view of the land. Through Nickerson’s lens, muddy, rutted lanes and straggly hedgerows are imbued with the quiet poetry of the everyday. People and place are united by the distinctive, cloud-filtered, northern light. Infused with a subtle grace, the work is a profound meditation on what it is, and how it feels, to belong.
A full-colour 48-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition. It features 17 exquisitely reproduced images and an essay by Aidan Dunne. It is available in the Gallery Bookshop, price €10. The photographs are all lightjet digital c-prints mounted on dibond and framed. Each piece is available for sale in a limited edition of 3.
Artist’s Talk: Jackie Nickerson will talk about her work, on Wednesday December 2nd at 1.15pm in the Gallery. Admission free, all welcome.
About the artist: In 2008, Jackie Nickerson was nominated by the Gallery of Photography for the AIB Prize, which she won. Much coveted, the AIB Prize is one of the major art awards in Europe and identifies artists of exceptional talent. She won the Curtin O’Donoghue prize in 2009 and has been shortlisted for the John Kobal award and nominated for several prestigious prizes such as the Becks Futures Award and the Prix Pictet. In 2002, Jonathan Cape published FARM, a book of portraits of farm workers taken all over southern Africa and in 2008 SteidlMACK published Faith which captures Catholic religious communities in Ireland. Her work is represented in many important public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Santa Barbara Museum. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Norman Mailer has stated that boxing is a metaphor for life. Investment of time and energy in a tradition like boxing can be explained through the desire to achieve stability in a rapidly changing world. It may also engender a yearning for a more vital existence and a longing for authenticity. In this photographic work, Mandy O’Neill uses the world of the amateur boxer to explore such ideas and to examine aspects of the human condition.
These images were taken over a two-year period at St Saviours Boxing club, Dorset St in Dublin.
Mandy O’Neill is a Visual Artist based in Dublin. She graduated with a BA in Photography from the DIT College of Photography in 2005. She has recently exhibited at ‘RUA RED’ Dublin 2009 and the RHA Dublin 2009.
CityArts and the Heritage Council in association with the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media and the School of Media, DIT present Archive | Image | History December 3rdMoved to December 2nd 5.00 – 7.00pm - The Oval Room, The Rotunda, Parnell Sq. W. Dublin 1
Whilst archives and archival practices have been a consistent feature of the historian’s work, visual artists and cultural practitioners have also engaged the archive as site, form and source to appropriate, reconfigure and interrogate it. This forum brings together a number of practitioners and researchers to focus on notions of memory-building and archiving in the context of historical representation, exploring ideas of experience, memory and community, authenticity and authorship, notions of the public and public-ness, and the politics of the archival imagination.
Participants
Walid Raad
The Loudest Muttering is Over: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive. Raad uses photographic slides, notebook pages, and videotape excerpts as historical artifacts attributed to various sources or characters such as Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, a leading historian of Lebanese history, or Souheil Bachar, an ex-hostage. The findings and claims of these figures are inspired by historical circumstances and objects such as the role of the car bomb in the Lebanese wars, and existing captivity narratives.
Anthony Haughey
Remembering to Forget the Past: The Destruction and Recovery of Archives. Haughey has been working on post-conflict situations over the last decade specifically in relation to Northern Ireland and the Balkans where the destruction and recovery of archives has been one of the features and legacies of conflict. A starting point for some of this work is the description by Dr. Kemal Bakarsic, librarian of Bosnia’s National Museum, of the firebombing of the National and University Library during the bombardment of Sarajevo when ‘fragile pages of gray ashes, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and gray negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand’.
Catherine Morris
The praxis of community remembrancing: projections from lost Irish archives The cultural practices of the Irish Cultural Revival breathed new life into the dying body of the nation. The Revivalists called the past into being through street parades, collecting of folklore, staging and publishing Irish legends and histories, initiating art and museum exhibitions, and by travelling with theatre productions and magic lantern shows. Using archival sources, Morris will investigate how this emergent nationalist culture depicted itself in public space drawing connections between the politics of commemoration and repressed histories.
Chair: Martin McCabe, DIT Fellow, Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media
The National Campaign for the Arts in Ireland is a broad and inclusive coalition that reflects the scale, reach and diversity of the arts in Ireland today. Its membership has a national reach that includes major festivals, venues, producers and representative organisations in visual arts, theatre, film, dance, music, literature, architecture and collaborative arts.
Henry Jenkins is the director, Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. In this viral-info-snack he discusses the power of media in a 21 century trans-mediated world. A world where converging technologies and cultures give rise to a new media landscape.
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