To You I Follow
An exhibition of work by David Killeen, Dominic Bell and Maria Cassidy.
Private View: Friday 8th April 7-9pm
The exhibition continues until Saturday 30th April.
The exhibition takes its title from a body of work created by artist David Killeen. This ambitious photographic project will be shown in Ireland for the first time and is a culmination of two years work by the artist. Taking a photo-diary of a unknown couple's trip to Switzerland found on eBay as a starting point, Killeen has followed the route of the couple's trip to produce his own series of photographs taken on the same day in the same place 75 years on. Killeen's images will be exhibited along with the original photographs and can be viewed as an investigation into the changing shape of the landscape, notions of memory and the timeless legacy of the photographic image. Evolving beyond merely retracing the steps of these two individuals, the series depicts an historical account or recording that goes further than the remit of the camera itself, transcending into a greater consciousness, devoid of boundaries.
Having recently been featured on the prestigious 1000 Words Photography blog, Dominic Bell presents a selection of highly anticipated works from his recent series 'Ongoing Mirror and Land Works, 2011'. Taking influence from land artist Robert Smithson, most identified with for his infamous work Spiral Jetty, Bell draws inspiration from a less well-known series titled 'Incidents of mirror-travel in the Yucatan', made in 1969, where Smithson used a group of 12 mirrors in a series of 9 photographs to map a physical journey through the landscape. In this series the mirrors were used to reflect the journey through the land and the camera was used as the tool to capture these reference points. Using this project as a departure point, Bell continues to explore Smithson’s concern that photography is purely a medium that takes away from things, and by inserting a mirror into the picture frame the process of photography is actually creating something new within the landscape. Bell's images create the illusion of space, allowing man to exist amongst earth and ocean and control certain elements and they portray man’s infatuation with the uncompromising nature of the seascape.
Maria Cassidy presents a selection of new postcard sculptures, incorporating her intricate 'POP up book', set within a hollow photo album and the recently completed 'Matchbox series'. Postcards are the basic vocabulary of Maria Cassidy’s practice. The found imagery and objects are amassed from various sources and bisected with precise cuts to create an amalgamation of stories, memories and visual signifiers. Her pieces no longer present a documentation of one person’s life and the people they loved, but of random lives that we will never fully comprehend as we are only given a glimpse through snippets of imagery and text. The 'Matchbox series' all have the potential for disaster, not gloom but an awareness of the tightrope that we all walk on. Matchboxes have the potential to cause irreparable damage, with a strike of a match they can set alight and self-destruct. The works are keyholes of other lives, of other places, reconstructed to create a surreal narrative.
