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Limerick City Gallery of Art presents “Fragile Absolutes Part 3” by Alan Phelan
Previewing Thursday, 11th October, the exhibition will run in Limerick City Art Gallery until 25th November, 2012. The exhibition will include the premier of two new films Include Me Out of the partisans manifesto and Speaking of Drives, Dialogue 3 as well as several other new works.

Phelan has created a trilogy of exhibitions that contain elements of his broad-ranging reactions to Slavoj Žižek’s turn of the millennium book “The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?” Phelan’s artworks within each exhibition have unfolded as alternative chapters to Žižek’s thoughts. The compelling narratives that run through the exhibitions present humanity’s desperation and insecurity through the twists and turns of a society seeking to redress the loss of some assumed equilibrium. In each, Phelan clearly indicates through a myriad of narratives that intersect with popular culture, revolutionary history, and the contradictions of contemporary revisionism. read more

Dec. 9, 2011 – Jan. 12, 2012

Preview: Friday Dec. 8th 2011 at 7pm

The Black Mariah, Triskel, Tobin Street, Cork

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. As with many recent exhibitions of his work, Phelan has combined contrasting works to re-narrativise them, using old and new pieces to chart out another story, in this case a party of objects, blinded by ego. read more

For this exhibition, Irish artist Alan Phelan will present several works that have been developed while on residency at HIAP over the past three months. Phelan works in a variety of media which include fabric, papier-mâché and video. The underground tunnels of Helsinki city formed the starting point for Phelan’s work here. These allowed him to develop his interest in “infrastructural aesthetic”, a concept that allows several parallel narratives to exist, linking the physical to the political to the societal to the individual. read more

Cabbages and Things contains two works; paper Cabbages and fabric Things. Both works are made in many multiples, filling the galleries with newsprint cabbages and the piercing stare of superhero ‘The Thing’.

The Cabbages were made in a series of fabrication workshops held in Dublin and Navan over the past two months, continuing Phelan’s interest in not only what art can mean, but the different ways it can be made.

The Things, created by Phelan alone, use individual versions of the cartoon superhero from the net. No one Thing is the same, but all seem emasculated when cut in fabric remnants. Together both works reflect on the nations bleak present; a labyrinth of financial crisis headlines and hopeless heroes who can never save the day. read more

Fragile Absolutes presents 16 new and recent works inspired by Irish artist Alan Phelan’s ongoing engagement with political history, cultural theory, popular culture, masculinity and modified cars. The titles, subtitles and structure of the exhibition are derived from a project Phelan completed during his time on IMMA’s Artists’ Residency Programme in 2008. Taking the italicised words from the Slavoj Žižek book The Fragile Absolute – or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? and using them as random word associations towards 15 ideas for works, now realised in a variety of materials and processes, from hand-carved marble, through to video and papier-mâché sculptures. The works in the exhibition traverse numerous sources and time periods, from current affairs, popular fiction, boy racers, nationalist heroes, world war, economics, psychoanalysis and globalisation. Phelan sets up a complex mix of the literal and metaphorical references, simultaneously providing background information on many of his subjects, yet leaving them open to conflicting modes of interpretation. read more

19 september – 27 october 2007

“Everything around me moves. Nothing is ever what it seems to be, everything is subject to constant metamorphosis, it all changes unexpectedly, and with lightening swiftness…” Guillaume Apollinaire

It is if Apollinaire has found himself, unexpectedly, in the recreational quarters of Odo the shape-shifter from a particularly tangential TV episode of Deep Space Nine. Unlikely, yes, but no more so than the formal, spatial and temporal shifts of meaning that occur in Alan Phelan’s installation Ralph, Eamon, Odo, Barbara, at mother’s tankstation. Wherein Phelan synthesises Aristotolean acceptance of the ‘given’ with a Platonic readiness to hypothesize a different reality, a different realm. In simpler terms, Phelan simultaneously employs and subverts the ‘it does what it says on the tin’ approach to the world.  Whilst Phelan’s individual sculptures accord to expected taxinomic systems of naming (i.e. Barbara refers to Barabra Hepworth, Eamon stands for Eamon DeValera, Odo is the above mentioned slippery customer, ‘Odo’ – who only ever really manages approximate copies of things, and Ralph equals Ralph Gifford – who? – we will come back to him) and apply appropriate expected meaning, they also employ radical shifts of lateral logic. read more

December 09 – December 08 2006

The LAB is pleased to present the work of Alan Phelan. Over the past ten years Phelan’s practice has been concerned with a variety of approaches to biography which were brought together in the publication “Bio” in 2005. Much of this work has never been exhibited in Dublin. For this show a new configuration of selected works with be installed. The works will be attached to and located around a large scaffold tower in The LAB. This installation will contain sculpture, video, photography, works on paper from various projects from the last 11 years as well as incorporating new works. The installation will promblematise many of the specific narratives associated with the individual works as the works will have to function in a dynamic new context. read more

28 September – 18 November 2006

Millennium Court Arts Centre is delighted to present ‘Fading Fast’ an exhibition of new work by internationally known Irish artist Alan Phelan. At the core of this exhibition are challenges to masculinity, identity, and perceptions of history. This is articulated through a base concept of ‘blending-in’ – a term that comes from a ‘stealth’ industry that seeks to modify or camouflage technology.

For more information about this exhibition and work of Alan Phelan follow the link to the artist’s website read more

Small: The Object in Film, Video, and Slide Installation is an exhibition of seven small-scale installations by John Baldessari, Matthew Higgs, Sol LeWitt, Jonathan Monk, Alan Phelan, Michael Snow, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. While much video art of the past decade has taken the form of large-scale installations and spectacular environments, this group of projections and monitor presentations made from the 1960s to the present explores the sculptural possibilities of film and video installation on a small scale. read more