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.

Related posts:

1. ‘Ten Miles Round’ by Jackie Nickerson
2. Photoworks 2009
3. International Exposure for Irish Photographers

Charles Jencks’s “The Century is Over, Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture” with its attractor basins, scanned from Architectural Review, July 2000, p. 77.
Via Archidose

Related posts:

1. The Reflecting City: The Reconstruction of Dublin

Opening: Thursday 11 February at 6:30pm
12 February – 10 April
Admission free
To launch the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Alliance Française in Dublin, a collection of acclaimed work by the important Irish artist Seán Hillen will be shown for the first time in Dublin since the 1990’s.
Best known for his ‘Irelantis’ series, where competing myths and visions cohabit a deliciously witty montage, Hillen is one of the most significant artists of his generation.
Hillen has also undertaken sculptural pieces, most recently the Omagh Bomb Memorial which has received both popular and critical acclaim.
As the ‘Irelantis’ images have come to be seen as the most vivid and emblematic expression of the dreams and anxieties of ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland, his works from the ‘Troubles’ era, based on his own gritty photographs, have become more widely-known internationally and are now studied as masterworks of the medium.

The ‘Irelantis’ images have since burrowed deep into Irish culture, appearing on nearly 20 book covers and in this exhibition the public will get a rare opportunity to see several of the delicate almost miniature original collages, together with a selection of a new definitive edition of archival prints.

From the book’s introduction by Fintan O’Toole
“Seán Hillen’s Irelantis images are maps of a world in which the imagination is part
of reality, the visual equivalent of the sound the sun makes as it sinks into the sea.
As soon as they strike the eye, Hillen’s collages also hit whatever remains of
the bold child within us. They have the lawless energy that impels people to draw
moustaches on photographs of the Mona Lisa, or to decorate mundane stories with fantastic lies…”

A full colour catalogue presenting the exhibited work will be available for sale at the Alliance Française.

Check also
Sean Hillen: http://www.seanhillen.com
Irelantis: http://www.irelantis.com

Related posts:

1. ‘EXHALE’ by Mandy O’Neill
2. ‘Ten Miles Round’ by Jackie Nickerson
3. The Look of the Irish

From their web site:
“The Exhibitionist is a new journal focusing solely on the practice of exhibition making. The objective is to create a wider platform for the discussion of curatorial concerns, encourage a diversification of curatorial models, and actively contribute to the formation of a theory of curating.

The journal is a publication made by curators for curators and understands itself as a site for critical debate in regards to the practice of exhibition making. The Exhibitionist will be published twice a year and will follow a strict editorial structure that revolves around the analysis and examination of past, present, and future exhibitions and other curatorial ideas. Under the title Curators’ Favorites each issue will present three texts for which three curators will write a personal essay about their favorite exhibition, contemporary or historic. This will be followed by an in-depth look at a historically important exhibition in the section Back in the Day. Assessments will comprise the core of the journal. Here four curators will focus on reviewing one significant contemporary exhibition from different points of view. Typologies opens up the debate around specific exhibition formats. The section Attitudes will feature a text by a member of the editorial board reflecting on the current state of exhibition making while Rear View invites a curator to reflect upon an exhibition s/he has recently curated. Every fourth issue a conversation about past contributions, the content and the form of the journal between some of the past contributors will offer a forum for self-reflexivity.”

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1. Paper Galore II
2. C-Photo Magazine
3. Discussion on “Trends in Contemporary Photography Publishing”

“On a chilly January morning 24 years ago, Corydon optometrist Jack Moss raised his new video camera to the sky over central Florida and captured one of the darkest moments in American space exploration the explosion of the shuttle Challenger.

In the videotape, a stream of white smoke behind the climbing shuttle shoots into view but Moss, his wife and a neighbor noticed immediately that More..something was amiss when the channel separated into two streams.

‘Thats trouble of some kind’, Moss can be heard saying. ‘That didnt look right.’

Moments later, someone is heard telling Moss that the Challenger had blown up.”

Via YouTube

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2. Dear Mr Pepsident:
3. On Convergence Culture

You may be interested in learning about Paul Lowe’s OPEN-i, an online network for the Photojournalism Industry, what it is and what does it involve. What is the OPEN-i community doing? Check the Invitation to OPEN-i

The keynote speakers at the conference were Martin Barnes, Elizabeth Edwards, Jens Erdman Rasmussen, Joan M. Schwartz and Martin Lister.

Thanks to the magic of the hashtags (#photonext) you can now re-read the broadcast and share some very interesting points raised – Jens Erdman Rasmussen curator Danish National Museum of Photography requoted ‘museums are concentration camps for art’. You can follow the whole list of tweets tagged #photonext

I asked Paul Lowe through Twitter if he could pass on a question to Jens Erdman Rasmussen, one that troubles me:
is the curator the new artist?

Coincidentally, yesterday, while Paul Lowe was broadcasting from  Sweden, some of us MAVIS students had a field day with artist Sean Lynch.

If I have learnt anything from Sean is definitely that the Artist is the new Artist, and perhaps also the new Curator - or has it always been? At some point, we spoke about the role of the curator in the preparation of his last exhibitions. After a long and very interesting answer he asserted and resumed that ‘not much, really’ – joking then about our future as students of Visual Arts Practices on a Curatorial strand.

But the thing is, when an artist develops his or her own practice in such a methodic and persistent way as Sean Lynch does, exhausting research paths as an everyday strategy, the role of the curator in shaping the presentation of the work is already done. Is it not?

These conversations remind me of a great post by EYECURIOUS entitled, Word of the Year 2009, where the concept of curator is re-evaluated and polished.

Related posts:

1. DeLorean Times Two
2. Global Photographies: Histories | Theories | Practices
3. Press Release

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Related posts:

1. On Convergence Culture
2. Revenge
3. Antichrist: The 6th Obstruction.

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2. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
3. Objectified