Exhibition
MICHELLE DEIGNAN: Posing as a subject amongst subjects - Maria Stenfors
THE SETTING: An angular white room, a former brick-walled warehouse which previously functioned as a textiles sweatshop, which holds 6 items: a SCREEN, a PROJECTOR, and four PHOTOGRAPHS. The PHOTOGRAPHS disagree, the PROJECTOR has a tendency to ignore everyone, meanwhile the SCREEN speaks constantly throughout, in her own worlds.
PHOTOGRAPH ONE: I am rehearsing towards something that will never arrive.
PHOTOGRAPH TWO: But you never wanted it to.
PROJECTOR: ...
PHOTO FOUR: Stop talking nonsense. The framing speaks for itself, even though she made us deliberately to speak for her.
PHOTOGRAPH THREE: 5,633 pictures of posing families were taken today in the gardens. 5,624 of them with digital cameras. In 6 of them, one or more of the children were crying.
Michelle Deignan’s new and recent work takes on the construction and easy acceptance of imagery’s presentation, the swallowed syntax and now unspoken tricks that are accepted as the normal mode of address. Her moving image and photographic work draws on elements of the documentary, placing them slightly askew, or more prominently on an audiovisual pedestal, to make them more than a bit self-conscious of their apparent authority. They speak, both explicitly and evidently, of their own inception and construction. We are placed as a questionable audience, or maybe a walk-in guest to something akin to a multimedia editing room, piecing together the disparate contrived performances taking place in front of us.
But her real protagonist may be the casual snapper, who by taking the photo has placed themselves within a matrix of viewership and receivership, apparently choosing their delightful shots from an individual free will, while at the same time the perpetuator of a pre-determined set of postcard images.
Maria Stenfors is pleased to announce Michelle Deignan’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Deignan is based in London. Recent exhibitions include ‘Based on a True Story’, ArtSway, ‘Oneriography,’ Green on Red Gallery Dublin, and ‘Terror and the Sublime’ in the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. Her work has also been included at screenings in Mains D’Oevres, Paris, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe and Picture This, Bristol. READ REVIEW
