Lundi 19 Janvier 2015 14:25:42 par actuphoto dans Expositions

In a newly commissioned solo exhibition for Project Arts Centre, http://www.garrettphelan.com/" explores the power and influence that cultural traditions and artefacts have on the contemporary psyche. Through the recollection of his experience of witnessing the winter solstice at Newgrang an extraordinary Neolithic site in Ireland and numerous visits to ancient sites throughout his life and travels, he questions the power such antiquated relics hold over us today.

The exhibition comprises two new video works and sculpture. The first video work is divided between a storytelling monologue by the artist, and a dramatically filmed grouping of ambiguous gold objects. The second piece is a throbbing animation, both hand drawn and computer animated, flicking through many of Phelan's most emblematic images.

Phelan's visiting and imagining of ancient monuments plays on a deeper exploration of personal politics, the desire to decipher the world, the limits of our understanding. With this work he re-tunes us into the frequency of these familiar relics, or in his own words, "the absolute present tense."

Phelan is asking, chanting, inscribing, even demanding, can we ever really be free from inherited social practices ? From the conditions and belief systems that shape and accompany us through our formative years and thereafter ? Can we be free from institutions ? Free from symbols ? Free from cause ? Free from history ? It is an agonised position and these are agonised questions. But they are questions asked around the proximity of Neolithic stones, of enduring objects which in Garrett Phelan's way of thinking may have achieved this idea of freedom. For they are things we know in part only.

http://www.garrettphelan.com/"