Alan Phelan
Blind Private Party
The Black Mariah @ Triskel, Tobin Street, Cork
8 December 2011-12 January 2012
Red Star Death Star, 2007
balsa wood, card, paper tape, cocktail sticks, glue, coloured polyester thermal film,
light fixture, cable
75 x 75 x 75 cm
This apparent lamp shade is actually a geodesic version of the Death Star from the Star Wars movie. It’s a poor approximation of a utopian design for possible socialist architecture fused with a plant destroying weapon, rendered domestic with a low wattage light bulb placed inside it.
Larkin Man
adhesive vinyl
100 x 82 cm
This is maybe an idealised yet emaciated worker, taken from the masthead graphics of ‘The Irish Worker’ newspaper edited by James Larkin, now blindfolded.
Rosebud Tunnel Face, 2011
cut velvet curtain fabric, printed cotton, adhesive
240 (high) x 197 (wide) cm
This hanging fabric piece is a clash of designs, fused by a complex pattern based on the front face of the tunnelling machine that historically dug through the Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland earlier this year. It is both pattern, cresting rosebud hole, and infrastructural mandala.
Thing, 2010
cotton sheet
150 x 150 cm (installed)
sheet size 210 x 190 cm
The Thing from the Fantastic Four proved ideal for rendering as lattice-work. He is both man and rock, strong and stupid, brave and reckless, absent and present, clear and clean. One bad pun that works on repeat as there are fifteen more similar pieces.
Protest Polar Bear, 2010
archival paper, EVA glue, toner, varnish
31 x 12 x 13 cms
(papier-mâché made from an article from the Irish Times about the street paper collectors called Cartoneros in Buenos Aires, April 2010)
This is not a rat, it’s a very small standing polar bear, protesting about climate change, and not hitch-hiking to Denmark. It’s about two countries that have no connection, about a world that is bent on the recycle, and a place where poverty is a career choice. This work is clustered with the following two in front of some fabric panels. They dead with peasant food and prophetic leftovers.
Cabbage Shade, 2011
light fixture, rubber leaves, wire, acrylic
size: 23 x 40 x 40 cm
A Skull Perhaps, 2011
Leftover papier-mâché, acrylic rod
skull size: 17 x 23 x 30 cm
rod: 89 x 1 cm
Larkin Man, 2011
vinyl adhesive, fabric, adhesive
graphic size: 100 x 82 cm
each fabric panel: 240 x 243 cm
Sweet, 2011
video projection, duration 4:48 mins
Sweet is video mash-up, overlaying and mismatching rowdy singers from a bar in central Serbia with the lyrics from a song by the 1970’s pop duo The Sparks. The crudeness of the subtitles echoes a perception of country trapped in the past of mercenary isolation and robust sexist traditions.
The re-Birth of a Nation (without Brian), 2011
papier-mâché reading glasses, video projection, duration 3:24 minutes
reading glasses size: 5 x 15 x 15 cm
Symbolically simple, this short video image represents the state of the nation, or rather the state we have found ourselves in, or rather out. It’s sister work includes a mask of Brian Cowen which is thankfully unavailable at present for exhibition.
Sokea Yksityistilaisuus, 2011
vinyl adhesive text (limited edition sticker available for 20 quid).
Various groupings around the building (it’s the name of the show in Finnish)
Alan Phelan
Blind Private Party
The Black Mariah @ Triskel, Tobin Street, Cork
8 December 2011-12 January 2012
Press Release
The Black Mariah is please to announce an exhibition of new and recent works by Alan Phelan.
Obviously this is not a party, it’s an exhibition. The show is a selection of videos, fabric pieces, and sculptures gathered from different projects and places made over the last few years. While there should not be any connection between the pieces they actually cohere to explore several related ideas.
With Phelan’s work there is always a mix several references, which often conflict to propose or create new viewpoints and interpretations. This sometimes is an attempt to undermine the certainty of our cultural assumptions through what has been termed as an “infrastructural aesthetic”. This concept allows for several parallel narratives to exist, linking the physical to the political to the societal to the individual. Visually the starting point is civil engineering, re-routed with unlikely content and materials.
The works in the show are therefore eclectic so as to reflect a complex reality of contemporary life (in Ireland) via the man behind our bankrupt economy, an overarching utopian failed fantasy, an emasculated super hero, a misogynist secret camera, the questionable futility of protest, engineering as non-functional decoration, and a fascination with the asshole.
Alan Phelan (b. 1968 Dublin. Lives and works in Dublin, Ireland) studied at Dublin City University, Dublin, 1989 and Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, 1994. He has exhibited internationally in venues including Oksasenkatu 11, Helsinki; Mina Dresden Gallery, San Francisco; Cabinet, New York; Chapter, Cardiff, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SKUC, Ljubljana; Feinkost, Berlin; SKC, Belgrade. In Ireland he has exhibited widely including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, mother’s tankstation, Dublin; MCAC, Portadown; Limerick City Gallery of Art, and Solstice Arts Centre, Navan. He was editor/curator for Printed Project, issue five, launched at the 51st Venice Biennale, and has curated exhibitions at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and Rochester, New York. Phelan was short-listed for the AIB Art Prize in 2007 for his work on the IMMA commission, Goran’s Stealth Yugo, 2009. He has completed several public art projects in Ireland, Wales and New York including projects for Dublin City Council, Dun Laoghaire Rathdown and the Department of Communications. His work is represented in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Limerick City Gallery of Art, The National Self-Portrait Collection and several private collections.
Blind Private Party is not a party, it’s an exhibition. The show is a selection of videos, fabric pieces, and sculptures gathered by Alan Phelan from different projects and places, made over the last few years. While there should not be any connection between the pieces they actually cohere.
With Phelan’s work there is always a mix, often conflicting yet proposing new viewpoints and interpretations of familiar topics. This sometimes is an attempt to undermine the certainty of [our] cultural assumptions through what has been termed as an “infrastructural aesthetic”. This concept allows for several parallel narratives to exist, linking the physical to the political to the societal to the individual. Visually the starting point is civil engineering, re-routed with unlikely content and materials.
The works in the show are therefore eclectic so as to reflect a complex reality of contemporary life [in Ireland] via the man behind our bankrupt economy, an overarching utopian failed fantasy, an emasculated super hero, a misogynist secret camera, the questionable futility of protest, engineering as non-functional decoration, and a fascination with the asshole.
Parataxis
political history, cultural theory, psychoanalysis, science fiction and sexuality – shaped through interests in narrative, trans-cultural potential, and provisional meaning.
Perception
Language of bad puns
Maybe it will function as a party on the opening evening reception on 8th December.
