Sean Lynch’s artworks investigate a wide range of almost-forgotten historical subjects. Using his practice as a platform against the cultural amnesia that surrounds varied topics, Lynch’s research, photographs and installations disclose and build upon fragile stories and objects, magnifying traces of an often-idiosyncratic existence.
Views of Dublin, a new artwork commissioned by the Gallery of Photography, is presented as part of the exhibition. In cut-out archival photographs and an accompanying publication, Lynch traces and interconnects a series of events taking place during and after the making of the film, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, in Dublin in spring 1965. A replica of the Berlin Wall was constructed in Smithfield Market. Liz Taylor and Richard Burton stayed at the Gresham Hotel for ten weeks, attracting much attention around the city. Afterwards, the materials of the wall were recycled to form part of Saint Christopher’s School, the first Travellers’ school in Ireland. Situated in Cherry Orchard, the school was organized and run independently of the Department of Education by civil rights activist Grattan Puxon.
Provoking an active remembering that reinterprets the role of history, Lynch’s speculative energy circulates in several more artworks. A collection of photographs and artifacts consider the remains and rumours surrounding Richard Long’s artworks in the Irish landscape; Joseph Beuys’ Irish visit of 1974; the last street Walter Benjamin saw; and a vandalized statue of Bill Clinton.
About the artist: Sean Lynch was born in Kerry in 1978. He studied history at the University of Limerick and fine art at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt, and is currently an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. He has completed solo exhibitions at Heaven’s Full, London (2008), Galway Arts Centre (2007), Limerick City Gallery of Art (2007), and has featured in recent group exhibitions at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork and Office Baroque, Antwerp.
Sean Lynch was awarded the Gallery of Photography Artist Award for 2008. An article previewing the exhibition written by Isobel Harbison, appears in the autumn edition of the Irish Arts Review, media partner for the Award.
Opening reception: Wednesday September 24, 6pm
Artist’s Talk: Wednesday October 22 at 1.15pm
Gallery of Photography is open: Tuesday - Saturday 11am-6pm and on Sunday from 1pm-6pm
All events and access to the Gallery are free.
For further information, press scans or to interview the artist, please contact: Tanya Kiang, Gallery of Photography 353-1-6714654, tanya@galleryofphotography.ie
After seeing Ursula's play this past weekend, I thought we might start some conversations. Here's some provocation.
Summary: The story of a love born in a very dark place between a man who wants to belong and a woman who wants to be forgotten. On a stormy night, they shelter in an abandoned summer home on Dublin's coast and tentatively discover what unites and divides them. Written and directed by Ursula Rani Sarma.
In The Magic Tree, Irish-Indian playwright Ursula Rani Sarma evokes a cliff-edge ride along an emotional path with as many twists and turns in it as a mountain road in Cambodia, where the action ends up. At the beginning, we are introduced to the two central characters: Lamb (a young woman, running away from home) and Gordy (a young man, naïve, suggestible, different). It’s a stormy night and Gordy has followed Lamb into a deserted squat. They get talking. (READ THE REST HERE)
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Here's Sarah Keating's interview with Ursula from the Cork Midsummer Fest...
I have a question re Ian's recent email outlining his prooposed approach to material culture in the context of Placing Voices. The question circles around the stated intention to abjure the traditional academic approach of documenting and creating 'typologies or evidenced based argumentation for the existence of specific identities'. Instead, immersion in the affective practices of the flaneur and recorder of stories is proposed. My question is: are the outcomes of these experiential encounters to be reshaped/processed into academic interpretations or do they exist as self-explanatory stories or evidence in their own right? Are these experiences to be converted in any sense into analysis? I'm not clear on this.This question is partly provoked by Daniel Miller's latest book The Comfort of Things which I'm reading at the moment. Miller's book takes the form of a series of elegantly crafted short stories of encounters with people in their homes in a London Street. The people, their homes, their contents and their lifeworlds are evoked in pieces that could easily pass for short-stories in the conventional literary sense. But Miller is professor of Anthropology at London University, and I'm having difficulty identifying the particular disciplinary practice involved here. Does the new epistemology involve an increasingly blurred line between the creative and the analytical?
Material Culture Mission Statement: Subjects not objects
I am interested in encountering and documenting the material culture (things) of the contemporary Monto as subjects of inspiration/inquiry rather than as scientific objects of interrogation/data.
The modern construction of a ‘material culture’ as something distinct from the embodied experience of the contemporary – as something separate or ‘other’ – I feel is an impediment to the articulation of the complex, constellated stories of places such as the Monto and Clanbrassil Street.
Rather than attempting to document and create typologies or evidenced based argumentation for the existence of specific identities, my work will focus on things as inspiration for storytelling.
The appearance of things and the story of their encounter and their subsequent ability to act as mnemonic devices, triggering old and new stories (both ‘true’ and ‘false’ and a mixture between) will the subject of study.
It is intended that this ‘show and tell’ approach will allow for a rich synergy with the digital storytelling aspects of the project as well as the sociological interviews. The strategy for the study will include:
-Walks of the area (as a flaneur) with frenetic and iterative encounter with things of the streetscapes
-Show and tell sessions where members of the community will have the opportunity to bring forward things which they feel are significant
-To be conducted in collaboration with Alice and Darcy’s work
-Case-studies of specific residences/addresses
-These will be determined through the identification of study areas by Tadhg and Paddy’s research and Cormac and Alice’s ability to arrange access to premises
-These will incorporate both conversations with the residents in some instances as well as personal explorations of the items of the house
-Ideally it will be possible to discover how things are utilized in different ways to create stories (Stories with things)
-Some will be representative (e.g. mantlepieces) – supporting identifications with places/peoples/memories
-Some will be hidden (e.g. piles of things or bottoms of boxes) – unintended memories, forgotten traces, obscured identifiations
-Some will be incidental/accidental residue (e.g. rubbish)
All things will be photographed digitally, with the intention of uploading them either into a weblog or into a storytelling engine or photo-spatial engine (e.g. Photosynth).
The deliverable will be a Story with Things – showing how both ‘old’ and ‘new’ things interact creating complex environments for memory activation, identification maintenance and ideological representation. In this way, it should provide a process-based time-slice of the lived negotiation of contemporary space.
Photosynth is recently developed software which allows you to upload and knit together a number of images of the same location into a navigable cyberspace. This video depicts the application of the software to the site of Stonehenge by National Geographic. This is something we could apply to the Monto or Clanbrassil Street - creating an online, navigable streetscape which could incorporate photographs of traces or objects of archaeological interest that might otherwise be glossed over.
Jonathan Harris has dedicated his life to collecting and sharing stories. He has developed some of the most inspiring and cutting edge story-telling media around. This recent talk at TED demonstrates how powerful digital storytelling platforms can be. We could possibly deploy something similar in capturing stories in the Monto or Clanbrassil Street.
His project The Whale Hunt shows the different possibilities for mobilising digital photographs and metadata to construct navigable digital photo-stories - creating different story-lines by select specific components. Have a play through the hunt HERE. Make sure to scroll down to the bottom of the screen to play with the different modes (mosaic, timeline, pinwheel, etc.).
His and Sep Kamvar's project - We Feel Fine - is an amazing demonstration of the possibilities of public blogging to capture a sense of how we feel about the world - creating shared communal stories. The We Feel Fine applet allows you to dive through a storm of contemporary emotions - shared publicly to the world. (This one is my personal favourite.)
Darcy Alexandra passed on this amazing project to me. The Center for Digital Storytelling has an interesting project exploring the application of digital storytelling to mapping and place-understanding. StoryMapping in their own words is:
"StoryMapping is a call to action. We are taking the lessons learned from more than a decade of work in Digital Storytelling, and integrating it with an emergent tool set of digital mapping technologies now available to the broad public.
Whether it is geo-tagging images on Flickr, building story-based GoogleMaps, developing Windows Live virtual tours, organizing local cell phone walking tours, or the permanent imbedding stories into locations to be received by Bluetooth and other wireless information, we can now create maps that share stories about the places that matter to us, and place our life stories in countless geographic contexts."
It could be an exciting possibility to explore similar synergies between archaeological visualisation techniques and digital storytelling in the context of Placing Voices / Voicing Places. This could help erode divisions between tangible and intangible in the context of heritage - as well as undercut temporal divisions between the 'past' and the 'present' in the understanding of management of heritage - particularly in diverse complex inner-city areas.
Placing Voices - Voicing Places is a collaborative investigation and mediation of the contemporary heritages and material cultures of inner-city Dublin. Clanbrassil St and the Monto will be explored throughout Autumn and Winter 2008 through archaeology, art, digital storytelling, photography and sociology. The project hopes to inspire news understandings of the co-temporal qualities of the things both known, forgotten and sometimes remembered about the places we civically share.
