Victor Sloan: Selected Works at West Cork Arts
Centre, Ireland.
10 October to 2 November 2003
©
Victor Sloan
Victor Sloan Selected Works 1980 - 2000 will feature in the West
Cork Arts Centre from 10 October to 2 November 2003. The official
opening will take place on Saturday 11 October at 2.30pm and will be
performed by Jo Kerrigan, journalist. The opening will be preceded
by a talk by the artist, Victor Sloan, about his work.
This is a major exhibition of Sloan’s work examining the whole range
of his photographic practice in which he has been engaged over the
past twenty years.
Throughout this time
Sloan has been particularly associated with a body of work which has
explored the Orange Order and its marching season. While the
exhibition acknowledges the significance of this series of work it
also aims to reassess earlier and later works, the Craigavon series,
the Circus series, which present a much broader area of study.
Victor Sloan’s photographic work has substantially consisted of a
hybridisation of painting and photography. He was also conscious
that, in exhibiting photographs in an art context, people might
dismiss them as being "just photographs", and he instinctively
wanted to make that kind of response difficult, to present the
viewer with something photographic that was not exactly a
photograph.
Most of Sloan’s work is firmly rooted in Northern Ireland, in its
subject matter and its immediate concerns. He has moved from the
subject matter of Belfast zoo to treat an expanding range of
paradigmatic social spaces and environments, including the resort
town of Bangor, the new city of Craigavon, the field in which the
Orange Order marchers congregate, the circus and the sports stadium.
In the light of everything he has done since Belfast Zoo, it is
reasonable to conclude that the marks, the various kinds of
interference, so to speak, that disrupt the optimal clarity of the
image, make visible the usually invisible substrata, the
sectarianism, the workaday tensions, the implicit threat of
violence, underlying the apparent normality of life in Northern
Ireland. More, there is perhaps the implication that just as the
images sometimes seem to be consumed from within, specific political
and cultural groupings in Northern Ireland might be poisoned by
their own histories or their own historical myths.
Equally, we can read even the spatial fabric of the prints as
representative…of emblematic environments - and the marks and
strains wrought upon the photographic negatives and subsequent
prints equate to tensions and breaks in the social fabric itself.
Address
North Street
Skibbereen
County Cork
Phone 028 22090
Fax 028 23237
Directions
The West Cork Arts Centre is accessible by taking the N71 from Cork
through Bandon and Clonakilty. Situated beside St. Patricks
Cathedral.
This article comes
from Talk Ireland
http://www.talk-ireland.com
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