Dee O’Shea graduated from Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork in 2009 and has recently completed a research Masters in Fine Art at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. O’Shea has been invited as a visiting lecture to Crawford College of Art and Design later this year.
“Originating in the concept of the uncanny, my work focuses on interior architectural spaces and structures and how architecture itself can create a sense of unease. Memory and fiction merge to create an unfolding, adjustable space, distorting reality. I invent, construct and stage small-scale architectural models that are often suggestive of the domestic or institutional. The models, which are temporary, are constructed with wood, card, wallpaper, tiles and other household materials. The work manifests through the photographing and filming of the models, creating illusions of real but illogical space. The photographs often render the scale intangible and the moving image uses theatrical and dramatic lighting to unsettle, turning everyday spaces upside down. The work is influenced by surrealism, the writings of new world authors such as J.G. Ballard who illustrate architectural space as psychological and metaphorical, and by the documentation of disused post modern buildings around Ireland. The work exhibited in Manifest is a combination of photographic images and video installation and is a culmination of ideas, initiated by my research into these empty spaces. Each image is connected through the use of domestic materials, each space observed at a fixed viewpoint. Continuity is provided through the video work, Locus Ad Absurdum: an endless, shifting and labyrinthine place, undeniably familiar, yet totally absurd. The installation of Locus Ad Absurdum, with its obscured viewpoint, allows one viewer at a time, creating an intimate yet incongruous relationship between inside and out, place and placeless ness. Although each image stands alone, this is a body of work created from the same concept and within the same context. They are all part of the same ‘building’ so to speak.”
