CHAIRperson of The Arts Council, Sheila Pratschke, will introduce Ireland’s art installation created for the 2015 Venice Biennale tonight Thursday 21 at Limerick City Gallery of Art, 6pm to 8pm. Having taken pride of place at the Irish Pavilion in Italy, and now at Pery Square, meet Sean Lynch’s ‘Adventure: Capital’.
Open house. Visitors to the show can take away a newspaper mock up of the Financial Times’ pink pages. Photos and print tell the ‘Adventure: Capital’ tales of this Gobán Saor labourer and his picaresque journey through islands and time. Also a DVD of the film-house flickers.
Lynch and Dr Mike Fitzpatrick, the Biennale’s commissioner in Ireland, will attend for Pratshcke’s Limerick opening into this multi-part work that combines several video narratives.
These were made independently and at different times but function adroitly with suggestions arising from sculptural, moulded, metal, photographic works. There’s a turf sandwich after Joseph Beuys, cartoons to puncture pretension, and latex/ plastic fruits on a plinth to tie in with the River Gods of plenty and the effects of emerging economies over centuries.
EV+A director Woodrow Kernohan curated the Listowel artist’s works. Look for collaborations with stone mason Stephen Bourke, [past works:] story teller Eddie Lenihan, the ‘Peregrine Falcons visit Moyross’ birds’-eye perspective, Bill Clinton’s bronze golfball from Ballybunion. There are sharp points to the metal beast derived from sculptor John Burke’s buried ‘Uniflo’ original and how a culture’s blame for failure often attaches to the external.
The theme? Various, such as “cultural history, societal structures or the contemporary environment and the role of the individual within it”. No, don’t wither, this is a fun and telling adventure. Make capital of its presence in our city until end of March. It took a team of skilled technicians and artists to move all into place at our municipal gallery.
Throughout the real joy is LSAD trained Sean Lynch’s sunny, inventive stroll through the UK and Ireland.
His enquiring mind and piratical nature have assembled stories and artefacts; his ability to make art (carved deities, debris from a motorway roundabout, alternative documentary) fleshes out this sprawling, colourful connectivity between art, burgeoning wealth and its influence, utilitarian angles to garbage and fine works, and how artists and various communities in several decades get it on or not.
