ARCHIVE & IMAGES OF WORK

Crawford Art Gallery: crawford open

1 December 2007 - 9 February 2008

Michelle Deignan, Amanda Dunsmore, Yvanna Greene, Michael Gurhy, Martin Healy, Fumiko Kobayashi, Maggie Madden, Paul McAree, Tom Molloy, Abigail O'Brien, Sam Plagerson, David Theobald, Andrew Vickery, Lorraine Walsh, Mai Yamashita and Naoto Kobayashi.

Crawford Open 2007, a biennial open submission exhibition of contemporary art at the Crawford Art Gallery, opens 1 December 2007. This exhibition, the sixth Crawford Open, has as its theme 'The Sleep of Reason'. Fifteen artists were selected by Frances Morris, Head of Collections (International Art), Tate Modern, and Enrique Juncosa, Director, Irish Museum of Modern Art. One artist will receive a prize award of €5000 which will be announced on December 18 2007. Crawford Open's theme refers to Francisco de Goya's 'Los Caprichos' etching 'The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters'. The works in the Crawford Open explore the innumerable foibles and follies found in today's society.

For Crawford Open 2007/8, PaulMcAree will be showing 3 paintings: Baghdad / Aldershot, 2006, TV Studio, 2006, and Toll Road, 2006. Using historical and contemporary images, McAree's paintings explore the dissolution of photography into painting and the friction of truth between the two. Subjects are falsely simplistic or commune, in order to later reveal to be from pivotal moments within Irish and global history. The everyday is juxtaposed with more sublime images of the quieter/aftermath moments of disaster to suggest a more complex meaning and narrative post-peace process. The work in essence looks at the nature of identity and its possible meanings.

Baghdad / Aldershot combines 2 historic photographs - one from the IRA bombing of Aldershot in 1972, and the other from the first cameraphone photograph posted on the BBC's website on the first day of Allied intervention in Iraq in 2003. The work looks at the history of pubic terror and its media qualification, seeking to draw parallels in the circulatory of history. TV Studio is two photographs from a coffee table book on the birth of the Irish State, from inside Ireland's first State run television channel, RTE. The channel, alongside the catholic church, would become the dominant educational and moral tool of the nation for many decades. Toll Road is a painting after a photograph of Ireland's most recent toll road, taken from the front cover of the Irish Times newspaper in 2005. It points to the economic and infrastructural development of a country and its priorities over its cultural value.

www.crawfordartgallery.ie

Paul McAree, Baghdad / Aldershot, 2006

Platform 2 : Dis-Re/place

Knockbride House, Bailieborough Co Cavan, Ireland

11 - 24 November 2007

Shane Cullen, Alan Phelan, Ursula Burke, Paddy Bloomer, Nina Tanis, Paul McAree, Fiona Dowling, Mary McIntyre, Simon McWilliams, Carole Lung, Áine Ivers, Seamus Nolan and FrenchMottershead.

The exhibition seeks to question the notion of a sense of place and community and how this is being threatened by displaced populations and multinational forces. Within the intricacies of the individual works curator Niamh Smyth has set up an arena for looking into how we relate to our locality and whether we are too eager to throw away facets of community life such as trust and looking out for your neighbour in favour of a society where the individual comes before the community. In light of a changing society and the shifts in lifestyle brought about in recent years throughout Ireland, Bailieborough is too experiencing a demographic influx of people who work outside the area. The displaced and the replaced as the title suggests, are the recently arrived young families pushed further and further out from predominantly the Dublin area due to spiralling property prices.

For Platform 2, McAree has installed an imposing billboard, in the style of free-standing advertising hoarding, within one of the small front rooms of the house. With the back of the structure facing the room entrance, the visitor is prompted to walk around to the front to see what is on the other side.

A large-scale digital photograph of an unspecified Irish landscape, with a superimposed text reads 'We forgive as we forget'. The photograph shows a landscape which could be anywhere in Ireland, wild yellow gorse spreading across the picture, to reveal evidence of factories within the landscape in the distance.

McAree has been documenting the slow encroachment of industrialisation within the Irish landscape for some time, documenting in particular his homeland Cork, and areas of the West of Ireland made famous in paintings by heroic Irish painters such as Paul Henry, revisiting landscapes over long periods of time to note changes and the inevitable march of modern life.

As with all of McAree's digital landscapes, the superimposed text is always from a non-related context - ie, mostly from song titles, randomly superimposed over photographs many times, where meaning may or may not cross over at certain points and imbue the background image with significance. We forgive as we forget is a chance coincidence of sorts, referring to multiple levels of meaning, while at the same time questioning notions of the 'loaded landscape' in art, and in particular Irish art, by virtue of the arbitrary system of merging image and text.

We forgive as we forget has many reference points within the themes of dis-[re]-place, suggesting that society is forgiving of commercial and industrial development for short term gain and opportunity. The absurd size and dominance of the structure within the space - and its displacement within the historic Knockbride house - may also be interpreted as metaphor for the imposition within the landscape of the markers of progress and change.