The title of the show translates as fussy, complex, over-ornate, or simply florid flowers – pointing to these photographs being more than just about blooms. The exhibition presents fifteen unique, non-editioned, Joly screen photographs of flower arrangements using the nineteenth century colour process invented in Dublin and revived by Phelan, as seen in exhibitions over the past two years at the RHA, Dublin; CCI, Paris; Void, Derry and The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon.
The photographs are small 4×5 sheet film sized images as they comprise of the sheet film from a large format camera and a digitally printed colour screen the same size. The Joly screen process is not a chemical process but instead filters light on exposure and display to create colour. The screen is made up of red, green and blue stripes giving the photographs a very distinctive appearance. Invented by TCD physics professor John Joly in the 1890s, the two-layer photograph also creates a colour shift upon viewing, similar to lenticular prints. These small photographs have the intensity of painted miniatures, illuminated by LED panels, demanding a slowing down in viewing, with a rich array of visual and historical reference points.
The images have nostalgic feel given muted colours and the content which are based on historic flower paintings. These works were made in collaboration with Dunboyne Flower and Garden Club. For Phelan this was also an opportunity to expand his interest in participatory practices – art making that involves working with others to expand the notion of authorship into a shared activity. Exotic flowers were made-up from domestic Irish gardens and German supermarkets, assembled to resemble abundant Baroque designs and exotic Spring bulbs. Seasonal blooms were also maximised over the 9 months that these images were made during.
With this body of work Phelan imagines a visual history the Joly screen never had, as the process was abandoned from use in the early twentieth century. To do this, he uses art and historical references spanning over 500 years. The work presents a “counterfactual temporality”, a longer potential history for photography that contextualises it prior to its technical beginnings.
Work titles name the source artist, year of their activity and a related historical event. The works do not seek to perfectly re-create or re-appropriate but construct a flawed approximate, out-of-sync and yet connected to a related flow of events. For example, it should be impossible to look at the Dutch Golden Age flower paintings without acknowledging the Tulip Mania that swept the financial markets, laying the foundations for the boom/bust economic cycle. Indeed the cultivation of flowers mirror the rise of the bourgeoisie in early Western imperial and colonial travels and land grabs, charting not so innocent trades routes, that are now the subject of much discussion and revision in decolonising Western art traditions.
The references are subtle but the direction of interpretation moves away from mere aesthetics. The photorealism of much flower painting belies the mixed-seasons of specimens on show and oddly negates the creativity required by the artists in assembling these painted arrangements. Similarly the history of floral art is often dismissed as craft. The thematic categories in contemporary flower arranging competitions however, require imaginative and conceptual leaps that are not dissimilar from art yet function and operate in parallel worlds.
The inherent ambiguity of the images ghosts a history the process never had a chance to image or imagine. Convoluted titles attempt to navigate possible interpretative paths but they only leave echoes of a past that never happened and a present that has still more to achieve or reveal.
This suite of Joly screen photographs was commissioned for the 2021 PhotoIreland Festival. “A World Looted” concentrates on the contested area of global fruit production, referencing corporate branded fruit controversies. The work addresses moments where the free flow of food was disrupted by revelations about their production, rekindling memories of imperial and colonial working conditions and histories, all connected to specific branded corporates.
The technique uses the Joly screen photography, a method of colour photography developed in the 1890s by John Joly, a physics professor at Trinity College Dublin. It is an additive colour method, with a striped red, green and blue (RGB) colour screen placed in front of the film in-camera on exposure and then again on display. Colour information is recorded on black and white film and rendered as a colour image when the screen and film are put together. The film is processed into a positive and so what is displayed is the film that was in the camera, not a print or reproduction. Over the past year further experiments have added layers resulting in dense images of stripes, colour, and photographic fragments. This also allows for issues around post-appropriation by referencing existing images and locating or placing the process along and into a different historical context and timeline.
Liberica Coffee Cup, 2019-21 Free posted package of ceramic cup, paint and paint brush (plus QR code to David Beattie AR work)
The Company of Others is a research art project that was concerned with relationships between colonialism, capitalism, and material culture. It took its starting point from Derry~Londonderry’s history – of the plantation of the city and surrounding area by the commercial guilds of London – but from there outwardly to other contexts and time-frames. The project was especially interested in the material practices of the livery companies that formed the foundations of British colonialism in the Maiden City.
“Liberica Coffee Cup” relates to Roger Casement and the coffee bean variety he acquired in Congo, called Liberica, now held in the collection of the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin. Liberica is also the name of a café chain in Indonesia where the bean replaced the diseased local arabica. Previously used paper coffee cups were hand drawn with the company logo to re-brand and up-cycle.
The project developed in this new iteration by combining other cultural references to explore a different kind of operational sequence common to anthropological discourse. The research initiates a discussion about the interconnections of global capitalism, disposable consumerism, branding, cultural appropriation, empire, nationalism and freedom.
The final research was presented within The Company of Others box; a limited edition box shared with David Beattie. Working with the potter Brian McGee, Phelan created the branded Liberica ‘kulhar’, or clay cup. Made using the “off the hump” wheel-throwing method, an pressed with a rubber stamp of the coffee chain logo during the first event in September 2019. Completion of the project was delayed by Covid-19 during 2020.
Recipients of the box complete the work by painting in the white logo with supplied paint and brush. On the side of the box is a QR code by John Beattie. Reading this code will take the viewer to an augmented reality, available Wednesday 1 June–Wednesday 1 September 2021.
The edition was made available for free sign-up on 1 June 2021 and fully signed up for and gone in 20 minutes. The release was promoted on Instagram stories the week prior and many recipients posted photos back.
Thank you to Sara Greavu, Laura McCafferty, Brian McGee, Brendan O’Neill, Emmet Brown, Paola Bernadelli, Catherine Hemelryk and Jak McGarrigle.
This cup is not a cup and more of a vessel, but more so a sculpture for you to finish making. The small cup of paint and brush included is to fill in the Liberica logo indent on the side of the cup. If you want you can also paint the cup with black acrylic paint. Then use it whatever way you want.
As a vessel it holds stories, not liquids. The fired clay cup is porous, so it leaks. It has only had a simple bisque blast and no glaze. It’s a utility object with a different use. You can decide what this is as long as it’s something dry!
The Company of Others wanted to make connections between the City Guilds of Derry/Londonderry and UCD Experimental Archeology via art projects. My idea was to work on coffee cups I had made previously by drawing a logo on used paper coffee cups. The logo is from a Malaysian café and coffee company. It is named after the coffee bean that grows best in that part of the world. The bean originates however in Africa and some of this variety was brought back from Congo to Ireland by Roger Casement while he was investigating humanitarian atrocities in the Belgian King Leopold’s rubber plantations. The beans are held by the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin.
I had previously made a film about Casement in 2016 and retain a great interest in this very complex historical figure. He had ended up being a hero on both sides of the political divide – as one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising and prior to that as part of the imperial project, working for the British Foreign Office, albeit investigating abuses of power and the dire exploitation of native populations in Africa and South America under colonial rule.
My approach was counterfactual or a type of fiction. This created an alternative reality, working around some factual events but 25 years after his execution where he is alive in Norway in 1941. There, he has to deal with various acts of betrayal as a mirror to what had actually happened to him in Ireland.
This cup project does not try to encapsulate all of this. It follows a different route or rather several routes around the world that ends back in Derry.
Imperial trade was never about equality and decolonizing empire is more urgent than ever. Nostalgia for trades of yore is a complex mix of tradition and imperial violence. Isolated away from a historical context simple professions seem benign but they all played a role in the colonial and imperial project.
This cup maps out a notional imperial trade route between Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Ireland. It may be counterfactual, but it is not untrue. The connections are knowingly wrong, or rather created to make a point. They did exist, they do connect, this is history.
So as a simple paper coffee cup rendered in clay, it was made off-the-hump. This means it was rapidly spun into shape by Brian Magee, a potter from Lismoughry, Saint Johnston, County Donegal. The method is for making fast simple shapes in volume and most notably used by chai tea cup makers in India known as Kulhad or bhar cups. This method is making a resurgence to counter the plastic and paper waste generated from modern materials.
These are the best kind of recycled coffee cup you can get as they are made from mud, a single material, simply fired. This off-the-hump coffee cup is now a gift of the thought process, from me to you. For you to complete or pass on to someone else if you like. Thank you.
The Company of Others Artists: David Beattie, Alan Phelan
Info CCA is pleased to present the first iteration of The Company of Others, an open research project undertaken with artists David Beattie and Alan Phelan and the Centre for Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture (CEAMC) in University College Dublin (UCD).
The Company of Others is a project that concerns relationships between colonialism, capitalism, and material culture. It takes its starting point from Derry’s history – of the plantation of the city and surrounding area by the commercial guilds of London – but from there speaks outwardly to other contexts and time-frames. The project is especially interested in the material practices of the livery companies that formed the foundations of British colonialism in Derry.
The 12 guilds that were given control over Derry and the regions adjacent were the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Tailors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners, and Clothworkers. The smaller guilds that joined them included the Cordwainers, Dyers, Scriveners, Upholders, Wax Chandlers, Tallow Chandlers, Broderers, Founders, Pewterers, and Fletchers. The names of these skills and trades evoke a set of practices, materials and processes that the artists have been invited to research in this public event.
David Beattie For The Company of Others Beattie has worked with the UCD School of Experimental Archaeology to explore the process of tablet weaving as a means to discuss technological change and a current shift towards an automated, machine focused society. Using the Guilds of Derry and the Weavers in particular as a starting point, Beattie’s research is drawing parallels between the effect of the Jacquard loom on the textile industry and current implications of artificial intelligence on future human labour. In 1801 Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards. This system became the basis for many automated and computational machines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading to the creation of IBM and the first computers of the mid 20th century.
In the current digital computing age, image recognition and deep learning is perhaps of greatest significance. Machines are being taught to see, think behave as humans do, recognising images, objects, and emotions according to their databases. The goal is to achieve a trans-human state that can replicate or even improve on human behaviour, evolving to co-exist in virtual, mixed and augmented worlds.
Beattie will present the results of this research on the walls outside CCA alongside a demonstration of tablet weaving by UCD researcher Bridgit Lee on 28 September from 2:30–4:30pm All welcome, human and machine.
Alan Phelan Alan Phelan references Roger Casement and the coffee bean variety he acquired in Congo, called Liberica, now held in the collection of the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin. Liberica is also the name of a café chain in Indonesia where the bean replaced the diseased local arabica. Phelan hand draws the company logo to re-brand and up-cycle used paper coffee cups. The project develops in this new iteration by combining other unrelated cultural references to explore a different kind of operational sequence common to anthropological discourse.
Related to histories of the Guilds and the Company of Grocers, Phelan’s research initiates a discussion about the interconnections of global capitalism, disposable consumerism, branding, cultural appropriation, empire, nationalism and freedom.
Working with the potter Brian Magee to create branded Liberica ‘kulhar’, Phelan will stage a demonstration of “off the hump” wheel-throwing of these disposable clay cups from 2-4pm. Specially imported Liberica coffee will be served and hand-drawn up-cycled cups will be available for sale or exchange.
Company of Others takes place as part of the Walled City – 400 Years programme of events, funded by Derry City and Strabane District Council.
Press release on Edition launch, 1 June 2021
The Company of Others Artists: David Beattie, Alan Phelan
Info The Company of Others is a project that concerns relationships between colonialism, capitalism, and material culture. It takes its starting point from Derry~Londonderry’s history – of the plantation of the city and surrounding area by the commercial guilds of London – but from there speaks outwardly to other contexts and time-frames. The project is especially interested in the material practices of the livery companies that formed the foundations of British colonialism in the Maiden City.
The 12 guilds that were given control over Derry~Londonderry and the regions adjacent were the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Tailors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners, and Clothworkers. The smaller guilds that joined them included the Cordwainers, Dyers, Scriveners, Upholders, Wax Chandlers, Tallow Chandlers, Broderers, Founders, Pewterers, and Fletchers. The names of these skills and trades evoke a set of practices, materials and processes that the artists have been invited to research in this public event.
The research will be presented within The Company of Others box; a limited edition box made in collaboration between David Beattie and Alan Phelan. Working with the potter Brian McGee, Phelan creates the branded Liberica ‘kulhar’, or clay cup. Made using the “off the hump” wheel-throwing method. You are invited to paint in the white logo with supplied paint and brush. On the side of the box is a QR code by Beattie. Reading this code will take the viewer to an augmented reality, available Wednesday 1 June–Wednesday 1 September 2021.
*This edition is now sold out.* Please visit our shop to order your free limited edition box. There are three available options – UK, Republic of Ireland and Gallery Pick-up.
David Beattie For The Company of Others Beattie has worked with the UCD School of Experimental Archaeology to explore the process of tablet weaving as a means to discuss technological change and a current shift towards an automated, machine focused society. Using the Guilds of Derry and the Weavers in particular as a starting point, Beattie’s research is drawing parallels between the effect of the Jacquard loom on the textile industry and current implications of artificial intelligence on future human labour. In 1801 Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards. This system became the basis for many automated and computational machines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading to the creation of IBM and the first computers of the mid 20th century.
In the current digital computing age, image recognition and deep learning is perhaps of greatest significance. Machines are being taught to see, think behave as humans do, recognising images, objects, and emotions according to their databases. The goal is to achieve a trans-human state that can replicate or even improve on human behaviour, evolving to co-exist in virtual, mixed and augmented worlds.
Alan Phelan Alan Phelan references Roger Casement and the coffee bean variety he acquired in Congo, called Liberica, now held in the collection of the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin. Liberica is also the name of a café chain in Indonesia where the bean replaced the diseased local arabica. Phelan hand draws the company logo to re-brand and up-cycle used paper coffee cups. The project develops in this new iteration by combining other unrelated cultural references to explore a different kind of operational sequence common to anthropological discourse.
Related to histories of the Guilds and the Company of Grocers, Phelan’s research initiates a discussion about the interconnections of global capitalism, disposable consumerism, branding, cultural appropriation, empire, nationalism and freedom.
The Company of Others takes place as part of the Walled City – 400 Years programme of events, funded by Derry City and Strabane District Council. Thanks to Emmet Brown for graphic design, Naomi Arbuthnot at Derry Print Workshop for screen-printing and Paola Bernadelli for photography. For further information please email info@ccadld.org.
Instagram post text
EDITION LAUNCH 1 JUNE 2021, 10am
The Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry is pleased to announce the launch of the second iteration of The Company of Others.
An open research project undertaken with artists David Beattie and Alan Phelan and the Centre for Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture (CEAMC) in University College Dublin (UCD). Initiated by Sara Greavu, with this phase led by Laura McCafferty.
The research will be presented within The Company of Others. A limited edition box made in collaboration between David Beattie and Alan Phelan. Working with the potter Brian McGee, Phelan creates the branded Liberica ‘kulhar’, or clay cup. Made using the “off the hump” wheel-throwing method. You are invited to paint in the white logo with supplied paint and brush. On the side of the box is a QR code by Beattie. Reading this code will take you to an augmented reality, available 1 June – 1 September 2021.
This free limited edition includes postage options for UK, Republic of Ireland and gallery pick-up. Order your edition on CCA’s website CCADLD.org [link in bio] from 10am.
The Company of Others takes place as part of the Walled City – 400 Years programme of events, funded by Derry City and Strabane District Council. Thanks to Emmet Brown for graphic design, Naomi Arbuthnot/ Derry Print Workshop for screen-printing and Paola Bernadelli for photography.
Alan Phelan Echos toujours plus sourds 7 Jan – 28 Feb 2021 Tues-Sun: 2pm-6pm closed Mondays
Le CCI est heureux de présenter Echos toujours plus sourds dans le cadre du festival PhotoSaintGermain (www.photosaintgermain.com/). Cette exposition de l’artiste Alan Phelan, rassemblant une sélection de photographies inédites ainsi qu’une œuvre vidéo et musicale. Au cours des trois dernières années, Alan Phelan a ressuscité une technique de photographie couleur inventée dans les années 1890 par le physicien dublinois John Joly. Aujourd’hui oublié, ce processus appelé « Joly Screen » employait des écrans filtrants composés de lignes rouges, vertes et bleues, utilisés en association avec un négatif noir et blanc. A travers cette exposition, Phelan retrace une Histoire visuelle imaginaire de cette invention, en mobilisant des références historiques et artistiques sur plus de cinq cents ans. Ses œuvres présentent une « temporalité contrefactuelle » : l’artiste contextualise son Histoire éventuelle de la photographie en remontant avant même ses débuts techniques. La pratique d’Alan Phelan est imprégnée par la re-narrativisation et l’écho de l’Histoire ; ici, les tropes familiers mêlant motifs floraux, autoportraits et objets sont magistralement réemployés pour nous raconter un récit d’invention, d’échec et d’amour.
Centre Culturel Irlandais is delighted to present “Echos toujours plus sourds” in conjunction with PhotoSaintGermain (www.photosaintgermain.com/) This exhibition by artist Alan Phelan which brings together a selection of his unique Joly Screen photographs and a music video work. Over the past three years, Phelan has worked on reviving a forgotten colour photography process invented in the 1890s by Dublin physicist John Joly; this short-lived process used screens made of red, green and blue lines in conjunction with black and white film. Phelan imagines a visual history this invention never had. To do this, he uses art and historical references spanning over 500 years. The work presents a “counterfactual temporality”, a longer potential history for photography that contextualises it prior to its technical beginnings. Arranged in sequences that mix floral, self-portraits and objects, the photographs’ titles acknowledge their source while creating a new story. Re-narrativisation and the echo of history pervade Phelan’s practice; in this case, familiar tropes are masterfully used to tell a story of invention, failure and love.
8 September – 31 October 2020 Void, Derry temporarily closed due to Covid-19 restrictions in Derry until mid-October see www.derryvoid.com for further information
echoes are always more muted is part of an expanded series of exhibitions that encompass continuing research into the intersections of history, sexuality, material culture and politics which have evolved through sculpture, participatory events, and photography.
John Joly, the inventor of the process, provides the biographical background to the 15-minute film Folly & Diction (2020). Instead of a detailed documentary, the music video format provides the structure with a narrative taken from a Samuel Beckett short story and narration in the form of song lyrics, culled from a poem by Jean Genet. The video tells an oblique story of loss, a forgotten history, and a failed relationship with his collaborator Henry Dixon. It brings Joly’s photographic process into a contemporary sphere with audio responsive animated stripes that pulse to the music and crude video layering that draws on multiple music video tropes.
Red, green and blue form the basis of how video screens present colour and how we experience colour in all electronic devices; this provides the background for other works in the exhibition. The centre piece of Gallery 1 is an installation of various props and parts which further expand the idea of a photograph as a multi-sensory object moving into an augmented reality and fragrance as a memory trigger. A small RGB hyacinth flower is enlarged via a mobile phone AR app and the sweet scent of the flower pervades the gallery. The mattress, pot, and plant notebook connects to the film, referencing an earlier script – elements that were eliminated in the final cut. The flower has persisted, however, as a memory trigger, as in the film, just like a fragrance, to a different sensory connection with the past.
The recurring use of this trio of colours shift to gels on spotlights, onto a new wall work comprised of screen-printed page layouts, from a zine dealing with images and texts that delve into a wider art history of stripes. The wall is punctuated by a single Joly screen photograph of a headless self-portrait, shot from behind, in red, with red roses, pushing bathos that bit further.
Five new Joly screen images hung close to this are the most recent photographs. They have dense compositions made of dots, with holes in the screen that reflect onto circular mirrors, creating monochrome gaps in the striped screen, overlapping into the objects photographed. Works by John Baldessari and Sigmar Polke provide more recent histories as reference points here.
10 Joly screen images in Gallery 3 traverse different art histories relating to the pre-photographic photo realism of 17th Century flower paintings; moving through cinematic references, advertising, 1950s ikebana Japanese flower arranging, queer photography, and more. The inherent ambiguity of the images ghosts a history the process never had a chance to image or imagine. Convoluted titles attempt to navigate possible interpretative paths but they only leave echoes of a past that never happened and a present that has still more to achieve or reveal.
This series of works expands on Phelan’s preoccupation with re-imagining history in a contemporary guise, he appropriates histories, deconstructing others to make a mélange of humorous imagery that references the gamut of art and photographic genres. It is an exercise of storytelling that is at once all-encompassing but ultimately a story of invention, failure and love.
Installation photographs courtesy of Void Gallery and Tansy Cowley.
Associated text
echoes are always more muted 8 September – 31 October 2020 Void, Derry Preview 5 September, 6-8pm
Alan Phelan’s exhibition echoes are always more muted is part of an expanded series of exhibitions that encompass his continuing research into the intersections of history, sexuality, material culture and politics which have evolved through sculpture, participatory events, and photography.
The genesis of this new body of work is the photographic process invented by John Joly (1890s) that created colour via a red, green and blue screen to create the full colour spectrum. The two-layer photograph consists of the striped colour screen and black & white sheet film, which also creates a unique colour shift upon viewing. The process was used into the early 20th Century and abandoned for colour without stripes.
John Joly, the inventor of the process, provides the biographical background to the 15-minute film Folly & Diction (2020). Instead of a detailed documentary, the music video format provides the structure with a narrative taken from a Samuel Beckett short story and narration in the form of song lyrics, culled from a poem by Jean Genet. The video tells an oblique story of loss, a forgotten history, and a failed relationship with his collaborator Henry Dixon. It brings Joly’s photographic process into a contemporary sphere with audio responsive animated stripes that pulse to the music and crude video layering that draws on multiple music video tropes.
Red, green and blue form the basis of how video screens present colour and how we experience colour in all electronic devices; this provides the background for other works in the exhibition. The centre piece of Gallery 1 is an installation of various props and parts which further expand the idea of a photograph as a multi-sensory object moving into an augmented reality and fragrance as a memory trigger. A small RGB hyacinth flower is enlarged via a mobile phone AR app and the sweet scent of the flower pervades the gallery. The mattress, pot, and plant notebook connects to the film, referencing an earlier script – elements that were eliminated in the final cut. The flower has persisted, however, as a memory trigger, as in the film, just like a fragrance, to a different sensory connection with the past.
The recurring use of this trio of colours shift to gels on spotlights, onto a new wall work comprised of screen-printed page layouts, from a zine dealing with images and texts that delve into a wider art history of stripes. The wall is punctuated by a single Joly screen photograph of a headless self-portrait, shot from behind, in red, with red roses, pushing bathos that bit further.
Five new Joly screen images hung close to this are the most recent photographs. They have dense compositions made of dots, with holes in the screen that reflect onto circular mirrors, creating monochrome gaps in the striped screen, overlapping into the objects photographed. Works by John Baldessari and Sigmar Polke provide more recent histories as reference points here.
Ten Joly screen images in Gallery 3 traverse different art histories relating to the pre-photographic photo realism of 17th Century flower paintings; moving through cinematic references, advertising, 1950s ikebana Japanese flower arranging, queer photography, and more. The inherent ambiguity of the images ghosts a history the process never had a chance to image or imagine. Convoluted titles attempt to navigate possible interpretative paths but they only leave echoes of a past that never happened and a present that has still more to achieve or reveal.
This series of works expands on Phelan’s preoccupation with re-imagining history in a contemporary guise, he appropriates histories, deconstructing others to make a mélange of humorous imagery that references the gamut of art and photographic genres. It is an exercise of storytelling that is at once all-encompassing but ultimately a story of invention, failure and love.
echoes are always more muted void gallery 8/9 – 31/10 2020
Gallery 1
each Joly screen photographs is comprised of: toned gelatin silver sheet film (reverse processed), duraclear c-print screen, acrylic panels, LED panel, MDF support, electrics, archival paper tape, insulation tape, steel and rubber profiles, coloured paper
from entrance:
dot glove, 2020
dot dish, 2020
dot head, 2020
dot orange, 2020
dot bird, 2020
The background (revised), 2019-2020
cold porcelain hyacinth with acrylic paint in pot, notebook with acrylic painted Oh Dearest label, plastic wrapped mattress, small pot, augmented reality hyacinth (point at QR code with mobile phone to activate and place on mattress), hyacinth fragrance (scented oil), photographic backdrop paper strips, found painting with over painted acrylic, Joly screen photograph (I can’t hear you).
when the idea is extinguished, 2019-2020
Joly screen photograph on shelf with screen printed layouts from the Small Night Zine edition Stripes et Cetera, RGB gels over lights
Gallery 2
Folly & Diction, 2020
HD video, 15 minutes duration
Gallery 3
each of the following Joly screen photographs is comprised of: toned gelatin silver sheet film (reverse processed), duraclear c-print screen, acrylic panels, LED panel, MDF support, electrics, archival paper tape, insulation tape, steel and rubber profiles
from rear of right wall
Ken Moody by Robert Mapplethorpe with stiletto 1985, when the Rainbow Warrior was sunk, 2019
Lime Teshigahara with peppers 1950s, when again things got ugly at the time of the Schuman Declaration, (blue), 2019
Banana protector in dressing gowns 1960, the kid and the young cavalier, 2019
Sofu Teshigahara 1950, when things turned ugly for ikebana (blue), 2019
Hogarth Curve Twister Morph 2015, when sitting was dancing, 2019
from rear of left wall
Metal Beard the lego pirate perhaps 2013, when Hugo Chavez and Lou Reed were murdered, 2019
Random Roman School on Candelabra 1704, with excess worthy of the Tale of a Tub (red), 2019
Underpants Darth, 1977, when it’s best to remain hidden, 2018
Jacob van Hulsdonck, 1640 when The Proclamation of Dungannon was germinating, 2019
Certainly not Tom Ford in yellow 2006, more Borat with an empty garland, 2019
RHA, Ely Place, Dublin 2 14 Feb 2020 – 27 Mar 2020 [show stalled 12 March due to COVID19 closure of cultural institutions] RHA Gallery II and Gallery III. Curated by Ruth Carroll
This exhibition brings together a selection of Alan Phelan’s unique Joly Screen Process photographs and a new large scale music video work about the inventor of this forgotten colour photography process which was abandoned from use over 100 years ago.
The photographs in Folly & Diction are arranged in sequences that mix floral, self-portraits and objects, with titles acknowledging source artists and related historical events. The show title embeds Joly & Dixon into this speculative history by homonym, while acknowledging the possible humour in these probable revised histories and queer re-reading of photography.
Phelan’s ambition is to create a visual history for the process that it never had. To do this he uses art and historical references spanning over 500 years. The work presents a “counterfactual temporality”, to create a longer potential history for photography.
Similarly he has worked with a variety of talented artists and musicians for the video who include Elaine Hoey, James Kelly, Ian McInerney, The Late David Turpin, and Louis Haugh. The video brings the analogue stripes of the Joly Screen into the digital age with audio-responsive animations which overlay a troubled biographical narrative about John Joly and his collaborator Henry Dixon. Typical of Phelan the story presented is a fusion of references coming from texts by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet and functioning outside of adaptation or appropriation to “re-narrativise” instead and create a new or different story history.
For more information on this exhibition, including full press release text and work titles below:
Associated text
RHA, Ely Place, Dublin 2 14 Feb 2020 – 27 Mar 2020 [show stalled 12 March due to COVID19 closure of cultural institutions] re-opened post lockdown 23-26 July and 30 July-2 August 2020 RHA Gallery II, RHA Gallery III Curated by Ruth Carroll
This exhibition brings together a selection of Alan Phelan’s unique Joly Screen Process photographs and a new large scale music video work about the inventor of this forgotten colour photography process which was abandoned from use over 100 years ago.
Over the past three years Phelan has worked on reviving the process, invented in the 1890s in Dublin by John Joly, a physicist and geology professor from Trinity College, Dublin.
Phelan’s ambition is to create a visual history for the process that it never had. To do this he uses art and historical references spanning over 500 years. The work presents a “counterfactual temporality”, to create a longer potential history for photography.
The photographs comprise of two parts – the sheet film from a large format camera and a colour screen, printed onto clear sheet. The Joly process is not a chemical dye coupler or inkjet but instead filters light to create colour, on exposure and then on display. The screen is made up of red, green and blue stripes, giving the photographs a very distinct appearance. The small images have the intensity of painted miniatures, illuminated by LED panels, slowing down the viewing of a photograph as well as allowing for a unique colour shift that happens on display.
Phelan also engages different installation devices on walls, windows and lighting to reference the process as well as narratives from a wider art history of painting and sculpture. He frequently collaborates with others in making work and in this case has worked with members of the Dunboyne Flower & Garden Club in making the floral images for this exhibition. For Phelan this is an opportunity to expand his interest in participatory practices – art making that involves working with others to expand the notion of authorship into a shared activity one where meaning remains unfixed and creating agency as well as new knowledge in the process.
Similarly he has worked with a variety of talented artists and musicians for the video who include Elaine Hoey, James Kelly, Ian McInerney, The Late David Turpin, and Louis Haugh. The video brings the analogue stripes of the Joly Screen into the digital age with audio-responsive animations which overlay a troubled biographical narrative about John Joly and his collaborator Henry Dixon. Typical of Phelan the story presented is a fusion of references coming from texts by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet and functioning outside of adaptation or appropriation to “re-narrativise” instead and create a new or different story history.
The photographs in Folly & Diction are arranged in sequences that mix floral, self-portraits and objects, with titles acknowledging source artists and related historical events. The show title embeds Joly & Dixon into this speculative history by homonym, while acknowledging the possible humour in these probable revised histories and queer re-reading of photography.
Joly Screen Photographs: Toned gelatin silver sheet film (reverse processed), duraclear c-print screen, acrylic panels, LED panel, MDF support, electrics, archival paper tape, insulation tape, steel and rubber profiles
All images were hung in groups of three with the following titles:
Steve Meisel for Jonathan Anderson on Constance Spry 2015-1950, when Leo revealed all to Marianne, 2019
Lily Reynaud Dewar as Twister Morph 2015, when sitting was dancing, 2019, and when she didn’t know what a conceptual artist looked like
Kawase Toshiro after the Great East Japan earthquake 2011, well after fake pine clusters, 2019
Metal Beard the lego pirate perhaps 2013, when Hugo Chavez and Lou Reed were murdered, 2019
RGB Hogarth Curve close up 1700, and the RGB cherub, 2019
Ken Moody by Robert Mapplethorpe with stiletto 1985, when the Rainbow Warrior was sunk, 2019
Dead Ambrosius Bosschaert 1614, when logarithms were sadly discovered, 2019
Carol Sawyer as Natalie Brettschneider as Leaf as Me 1986, when Ray was really Miller, 2019
Tsuki Karakuchi Arizona ikebana 2015, when lotus is a rose not a hebdo, 2019
Jimmy de Sana cones with Robert Mapplethorpe Dianne B’ jumper 1982, when Michael Jackson released Thriller and they all died, 2019
Constance Spry 1938, when the War of the Worlds broadcast invented Superman, 2019
André Breton by Man Ray 1930, in green morph not available in Weimar Germany, 2019
Random Roman School on Candelabra 1704, with excess worthy of the Tale of a Tub (red), 2019
Vintage Fag with bra 1940, when really it’s a fag with a fag in a bra, (green), 2019
Lime Teshigahara with peppers 1950s, when again things got ugly at the time of the Schuman Declaration, (blue), 2019
Certainly not Tom Ford in yellow 2006, more Borat with an empty garland, 2019
Constance Spry 1935, when Brie Van der Kamp from Wisteria Lane remembered Laburnum Crescent but all she got was Drumcondra, 2019
Steve Meisel for Jonathan Anderson on Constance Spry 2015-1950, when we got the right to marry, 2019
Three primary forms 1919-1933, does this point more clearly to the fourth dimension, or just the end of the world? 2019 with red, green and blue paper appliqués (to the rear)
When Henri Fantin Latour’s basket of roses 1890, became power corruption and lies, 2019
Folly & Diction, 2020 video projection, duration 15 minutes
Folly & Diction, 2020 Written, directed and produced by Alan Phelan Music by Kelly & McInerney Vocals by Turpin & Jrdn Acting by Hanly & Hanly Action & Animation by Beckett & Hoey Moustache & Lyrics by Sherlock & Genet Film & Assist by Phelan, Donnellon & Edmonson Life by Joly & Dixon
A music video about John Joly, inventor of the Joly screen colour photography process, narrativised via elements of a story by Samuel Beckett and a poem by Jean Genet; sung by The Late David Turpin and Jrdn (Xona) with music composed by James Kelly and Ian McInerney; performed by father and son Peter and Luke. The piece is structured like a music video, yet based on literary sources, with Joly singing a story of unrequited history, of a forgotten moment in the invention of colour photography, poetically recanting loss an abandonment as a way of telling this story.
The artist would like to thank the RHA for supporting the production of Folly & Diction and also acknowledge the support of Creative Ireland, Meath County Council Cultural Services, Solstice Arts Centre, members of Dunboyne Flower & Garden Club; NCAD, TBG+S, FSAS, The LAB, The Dock, The Arts Council; and exhibition partners Void, Derry/Londonderry and the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris.
Many thanks also to Louis Haugh, James Kelly, Ian McInerney, The Late David Turpin, Jrdn, James Hanly, Luke Hanly, Elaine Hoey, Val Sherlock, Noel Donnellon, Sarah Edmonson, Noel Kelly and all who helped out in many ways. Members of the Dunboyne Flower & Garden Club, who participated in workshops: Mary Dalton, Jean Hamilton, Beatrice Hartog, Adrienne Hatch, Geraldine Johnson, Kay Kelly, Veronica Madden, Isabella Molloy, Ciara Murphy, Noreen Ní Chinnéide, Dolores O’Leary, Marie Orr, Harriet Phelan, Mary Ronayne, Margaret Rowan, Angela Sheehy
Public Events
Wednesday 4 March, 6.30pm: Love: first, second, third
In this live performance, two actors will read, critique and deconstruct two of the literary texts by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet that are referenced in Phelan’s video work. The event explores fan fiction which switches genders and the sexuality of characters from original texts as Phelan has done in his film. With a live re reading of the source material the actors will interact with live video projection, offering an additional commentary, providing different insights into how all three texts can, and have been interpreted. Booking is essential for this event.
(COVID) cancelled : Saturday 21 March, 2pm: A Dance Response by Dublin Youth Dance Company
All welcome, booking not required. Over the course of Phelan’s exhibition, Dublin Youth Dance Company (DYDC) will be developing a dance performance in response to the work in the show. This response will be presented to the public in the gallery on Saturday 21 March at 2pm.
𝔸𝕣𝕥 𝕘𝕒𝕝𝕝𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕤 𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕔𝕝𝕠𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣 𝕒 𝕨𝕖𝕖𝕜 𝕕𝕦𝕖 𝕥𝕠 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕡𝕒𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕞𝕚𝕔. The night’s city lights find their way through the glass ceiling of the art institution, to fall down down down into the atrium, where a moth flits here & there & up up up like a fist of fossilised news sheets. A light flickers in one of the first-floor galleries & the moth punches to the right to alight on a wall & unclinch.
Flicker, flicker, flicker, the light goes on & goes off, illuminating one husk of an object among a graveyard of others set at eye-level on the gallery walls as far as the moth’s eye can see in the flickering darkness. The moth lays there in constant low-level anxiety, heaving under the winking light’s attraction but unwilling to get lost in the drift of darkness.
Under the beating light a synaptic fire flickers in the moth, bright in association & dark in sentiment, as the parts of the image that comprise the photographic plate that comprises most of the husk behind which the flickering light transmits, collapse into a red-green-blue tartan jumble of an insect-man poised on pearlescent cones straddled painfully on a floor wearing a jumper – an asymmetrically patterned orange & cream & black & square jumper – against a lime-green rubbery stage like skinned waders.
And then there was Light & the Word & names of artists & lives lived: Robert Mapplethorpe (42, 1989), Peter Hujar (53, 1987), Félix González-Torres (38, 1996), David Wojnarowicz (37, 1992), Craig Owens (39, 1990), Jimmy DeSana (40, 1990).
The moth likes the DeSana cones, the Brillcream’d mass of Mapplethorpe’s head of hair that is hard to imagine a face behind, but it’s not too gone on the Dianne B jumper even though it helps plant an orange rectangle centrestage so the rest of Mapplethorpe’s body can contort on the floor in the dark, in the light, in innuendo.
The image also frightens the moth, noticing the meta in the metamorphosis of both portraits, insect-turned-man-turned insect & one story about a salesman that starts with the sentence: “One morning Gregor Samsa woke in his bed from uneasy dreams and found he had turned into a large verminous insect.”
[In response to Alan Phelan’s Fiction & Folly at the Royal Hibernian Academy, 2020]
MARCH 25, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night
Alan Phelan Who the Hell ** **? by A**** D****, I**** T****, unwritten, unpublished.
Alan Phelan’s work is a little hard to pin down. I never can really cope with his ever shifting use of mediums and techniques or the multitude of references that the works are crammed with but moreover that is not rooted in a paint based medium.
Given his use of everything from stainless steel to projected video over the past 25 years since his first solo show in the Gallery of Photography in 1993 there is maybe is a pattern to be discerned or found somewhere. Photography has always been a key factor alongside history like with that first show which provided a kind documentary evidence of Egon Schiele’s visits to Ireland in search of Sheela-na-gigs (misinterpreting their sexual gestural forms as masturbatory). Clearly this never happened and the pseudo museum documentary display was never there to fully fool anyone. The show formed a project satirising the genius Modernist painter, presenting Ireland as a source of primitivism as so brilliantly aped by man painters from the School of Paris. While a film essay would have maybe made this clearer and more legible, Phelan chose to present this complex historical crisis as a fragments museum display, adopting the authority of the museum but giving us none of the actual art. Interpretative evidence, falsified and doctored was instead presented to tell a fictional art history that somehow claimed post-colonial discourse as enough of a concept to suffice.
Shuffle forward a few decades and this is again manifested in his 2016 Roger Casement film which created a counterfactual (read fictional) history of Casement, alive in 1941, exiled in Norway with an adulterous Nazi boyfriend and withering Alice Stopford Green who re-enact betrayal not actual historical fact. This slow ponderous work captured a kind of boredom with history which mass commemorations always get wrong in their energetic attempt to find the past relevant or uncomplicated.
What really confuses me also is when artists decide to be writers and curators. Like others from his generation, (he is now in his early 50s), they have adopted a post-conceptual approach where form fits ideas not function and art history is a field to be harvested not left fallow where manure gets spread every other year. You can really only do one thing well so why try to be everything to everyone when audiences only have limited capacities and intelligence. An art critics judgement and gate keeping responsibilities are onerous and not to be taken lightly.
Engagement as it’s now championed has to come from the top down and the author is primary. Once the prevail of relational aesthetics, when art briefly opened by a wider discussion about itself, engagement is better left to the education officer. The legacy of Walter Benjamin or key artists from the 90s like Felix Gonzalez Torres who position the audience as central to completing the artwork are poor role models and are best left out or forgotten. This never worked and yet some artists continue to push ideas which are contradictory, saying one thing and meaning another, as if this was some way not a reflection on how the world actually works or any political dynamic functions.
Art history fiction spun on a homonym is something Phelan continues to do. It harks back to a need or insecurity to explain which comes up from a practice or career that fluidly mixes curating exhibitions with art criticism, art writing with the making. One thing he has not done is run an art space and this is probably because is has worked part-time as an archivist in parallel to being an artist. Having not gone to art school proper surely gives an insecurity or need to explain anyway, and perform knowledge, as one could say, perhaps but also ties to a generation of artists who have decided to do it all, or as much as they can rather than expect the scene, academy or crowd to catch up and notice.
The current RHA show is a bizarre soup of references, somehow attempting to traverse several hundred years of image making to create yet another false history. Choosing an obscure photography process is rendered nostalgia free when the conceptual background is so complex that you end up thinking about a wide range of ideas instead of just looking at something on a wall and wondering how it was made. The accompanying video savages some literary references from Beckett and Genet, never connecting or revealing a coherent narrative but slavishly mimicking the tropes of the music video genre to sell what exactly? This work Folly & Diction covers up a gay romance and working relationship to revel in music and animated stripes. The Joly process is not explained but exploded in to a contemporary context, anchored in historical mistruths or half-truths, something maybe best left forgotten.
The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim 16 November 2019 – 04 January 2020 Curated by Sarah Searson
This exhibition marked the first major exhibition of this body of work. The photographs are small 4×5 sheet film sized images as they comprise of the sheet film from a large format camera and a colour screen. The Joly Screen Process is not a chemical process but instead filters light on exposure and display to create colour. The screen is made up of red, green and blue stripes which Phelan then engages as installation devices on walls and windows to reference the process and a wider art history of installation. The small images have the intensity of painted miniatures, illuminated by LED panels, slowing down the viewing of a photograph as well as allowing for a unique colour shift that happens on display.
The images have nostalgic feel given muted colours and the content of this selection of work which reference historic flower paintings made in collaboration with Dunboyne Flower and Garden Club. For Phelan this is an opportunity to expand his interest in participatory practices, art making that involves working with others to expand the notion of authorship into a shared activity, one that remains unfixed and creating agency as well as new knowledge in the process.
The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim 16 November 2019 – 04 January 2020 Curated by Sarah Searson
https://www.thedock.ie/exhibitions/red-lines
This exhibition marked the first major exhibition of this body of work. The photographs are small 4×5 sheet film sized images as they comprise of the sheet film from a large format camera and a colour screen. The Joly Screen Process is not a chemical process but instead filters light on exposure and display to create colour. The screen is made up of red, green and blue stripes which Phelan then engages as installation devices on walls and windows to reference the process and a wider art history of installation. The small images have the intensity of painted miniatures, illuminated by LED panels, slowing down the viewing of a photograph as well as allowing for a unique colour shift that happens on display.
The images have nostalgic feel given muted colours and the content of this selection of work which reference historic flower paintings made in collaboration with Dunboyne Flower and Garden Club. For Phelan this is an opportunity to expand his interest in participatory practices, art making that involves working with others to expand the notion of authorship into a shared activity, one that remains unfixed and creating agency as well as new knowledge in the process.
Joly Screen Process Photographs: Toned gelatin silver sheet film (reverse processed), duraclear c-print screen, acrylic panels, LED panel, MDF support, electrics, archival paper tape, insulation tape, steel and rubber profiles.
Gallery arch by door on right: 1. Juan van der Hammen 1627, when the last aurochs died, 2019 2. Giuseppe Arcimboldo 1580, when Drake was second to circumnavigate, 2019 3. Constance Spry 1957, when post-war austerity was ruined by The Treaty of Rome, 2019
Wall: 4. Anna Ruysch 1690, when Aqua Admirabilis could have smelt of Orange (red), 2019 5. Joseph Lauer 1850, when Neanderthal fossils were The Origin of Species (green), 2019 6. Sofu Teshigahara 1950, when things turned ugly for ikebana (blue), 2019
7. Jan van Huysum 1720, when a different proposal by Swift was of Irish manufacture, 2019 8. Jean-Baptiste Belin de Fontenay 1705, when Mirabell and Millamant were in full Restoration abundance, 2019 9. Jan van Huysum 1724, when The South Sea Bubble inspired unconsolidated debt, 2019
Over Fireplace: 10. Hans Memling 1490, when the prophetic extinction occurred, 2019
Windows: RGB, 2019 Photographic paper in red, green and blue, cut in 15cm strips.
Mezzanine: Red Lines, 2019 Red photographic paper, cut in 15cm strips; mirror polished stainless-steel lettering backing on black expanded vinyl
With thanks to:
Louis Haugh, photography and darkroom
Members of the Dunboyne Flower & Garden Club, who participated in workshops:
Mary Dalton, Jean Hamilton, Beatrice Hartog, Adrienne Hatch, Geraldine Johnson, Kay Kelly, Veronica Madden, Isabella Molloy, Ciara Murphy, Noreen Ní Chinnéide, Dolores O’Leary, Marie Orr, Harriet Phelan, Margaret Rowan, Angela Sheehy, Margaret Rowan, Mary Ronayne
Alan Phelan and Dunboyne Flower and Garden Club were recipients of Meath County Council Cultural Services Creative Award 2019. This award is supported by the Meath County Council Creative Ireland Programme. Research for this project was thanks to an Arts Council Visual Arts Bursary.
Installation shots by Paul McCarthy
Download essay below:
Joanne Laws Arts Writer in Residence: A response to an exhibition ‘Red Lines’ Alan Phelan
Red Lines are all too familiar in political parlance right now. They mean everything and nothing, intractable demands that must shift but cannot shift, but then do. History is filled with similar moments, and with this exhibition the origins of photography and conceptual art are called out, asking questions about fundamentals and apparent universals. Leading on from Phelan’s counterfactual approaches in Irish revolutionary history, this exhibition presents a body of work that creates a new perspective on the photography, based on forgotten methodologies to make an alternate history.
On entry to the former court house building where The Dock is located, the staircase and mezzanine are fitted with red strips. These mark a line between decorative intervention and conceptual conceit – playing off the infamous stripes of Daniel Buren, who was both ridiculed and celebrated for his ambition to render art mechanically systematic yet perceptually site sensitive. Ultimately his work was embraced by the museum it sought to smash yet embedded in much art history as it is impossible to think of stripes with him.
The lines also refer the photographic process revived by Phelan over the past three years. In this first large showing of contemporary Joly Screen Photographs, Phelan presents a historical overview of floral art, giving this unique colour process a history it never had, having been abandoned from use over 100 years ago.
Since the Joly Screen Process has been forgotten, reviving it creates a new history, one that also shifts the origins of photography itself into a different timeline. Located instead in the socio-economic framework of imperialism, the Joly Screen photographs in the show reference the writings of photography theorist Ariella Azoulay, presenting a photography that originates in the 1490s, displacing it from the technology of the 1830s connecting to a different “imperial temporality”.
The images in Red Lines are based around the history of flower painting and flower arranging. Work titles name the source artist, year of their activity and a related historical event. The works do not seek to perfectly re-create or re-appropriate but construct a flawed approximate, out-of-sync and yet connected to a related flow of events. For example, it should be impossible to look at the Dutch Golden Age flower paintings without acknowledging the Tulip Mania that swept the financial markets, laying the foundations for the boom/bust economic cycle. Indeed the cultivation of flowers mirror the rise of the bourgeoisie in early Western imperial and colonial travels and land grabs, charting not so innocent trades routes, that are now the subject of much discussion and revision in decolonising Western art traditions. In a sequence of three images based on paintings from the early 1700’s, exotic flowers are made-up from domestic gardens and German supermarkets, assembled to resemble abundant Baroque designs, exotic Spring bulbs and unconsolidated debt. The references are subtle but the direction of interpretation is away from mere aesthetics.
The photorealism of much flower painting belies the mixed-seasons of specimens on show and oddly negates the creativity required by the artists in assembling these painted arrangements. Similarly the history of floral art is often dismissed as craft. The thematic categories in contemporary flower arranging competitions however, require imaginative and conceptual leaps that are not dissimilar from art yet function and operate in parallel worlds. Working with members of Dunboyne Flower and Garden Club over the past 9 months, Phelan has held monthly workshops where arrangements were created and photographed. Seasons, art eras and floral art ground breakers like Constance Spry were used to make this history for the Joly Screen spanning 500 years.
Red Lines begins a history that was forgotten, re-drafting a timeline for photography that enables it to speak about a wide range of topics. This is the first exhibition of five upcoming shows into 2020 that will re-align photography to different histories and timelines, not to re-enact but create something that should potentially exist.
Joly Screen Process photographs used in installations and group exhibitions:
“The Parted Veil”, curated by Chris Clarke, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, UCC, Cork
“The last great album of the decade”, curated by PE Moore and Sheena Barrett, The Lab, Dublin
“when the idea is extinguished”, Atrium commission at TBG+S, Dublin
Associated text
“THE PARTED VEIL: COMMEMORATION IN PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICES”, CURATED BY CHRIS CLARKE, LEWIS GLUCKSMAN GALLERY, UCC, CORK, UNTIL 30 JUNE, 2019
Dervla Baker, Lian Bell, Lisa Butterly & Lisa McCormack, David Creedon, Adrian Duncan, Cáit Fahey, John Halpin, Roseanne Lynch, Tom Molloy, Vukasin Nedeljkovic / Asylum Archive, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Miriam O’Connor, James Parkin, Alan Phelan, Amelia Stein, Mhairi Sutherland
13 April – 30 June 2019
Curated by Chris Clarke and Fiona Kearney, The Parted Veil: Commemoration in photographic practices is an exhibition of sixteen Irish artists who have used the photographic image to consider ideas of remembrance and celebration, and especially to reflect how intimate experiences express the wider events shaping our contemporary world.
Alan Phelan’s work revives an obsolete method of photography in order to explore ideas of image circulation and political activism. The Joly Screen Process was invented in Ireland in the 1890s by John Joly, a physics professor at Trinity College Dublin. His technique, which used different screens to expose and view the image, was deemed commercially unviable compared to the Autochrome process of the Lumierè Brothers and ultimately fell into obscurity. Phelan’s renewal of this process – realised as unique photographic prints displayed in light-boxes – both honours Ireland’s forgotten role in photographic history and questions the dominant narratives that seem to shape its national identity.
A dedicated publication is being developed to mark the exhibition and will feature images from the exhibition, a contextual essay by Dr. Adam Hanna and poems from invited Irish writers Ailbhe Darcy, Vona Groarke, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Billy Ramsell, and Leanne O’Sullivan
Work titles (initially untitled but now titled as follows):
Anon feather porn, 1950s, when florescence becomes Acme pink, 2018
Frank Hurley frozen face 1911, when on the first Antarctic expedition before it melted, 2018
Red Hot Chili Peppers claimed I’m the rainbow in your jail cell 2002, when all the memories of everything you’ve ever smelled occurred, 2018
“THE LAST GREAT ALBUM OF THE DECADE”, CURATED BY PE MOORE AND SHEENA BARRETT, THE LAB, DUBLIN, 2019
ANNE MAREE BARRY, DECLAN CLARKE, ALAN PHELAN, CLÍODHNA TIMONEY, THE BRIAN MCMAHON ARCHIVE (BRAND NEW RETRO)
March 22 – May 12 2019
The LAB Gallery is pleased to present the Last Great Album of the Decade in association with Musictown.
The exhibition is co-curated by Pádraic E Moore and Sheena Barrett and features new work by Anne Maree Barry, Declan Clarke, Alan Phelan and Cliodhna Timoney. The title is both suitably brash, claiming greatness, and mournful, in suggesting that it can’t be surpassed.
This exhibition seeks to celebrate the musical relic and souvenirs of the subculture, taking in gigs in the 90s, a selection of zines from Brand New Retro, the Dublin rave scene in the early 2000s, the demise of rural nightclubs and journeys from early photographic experiments through to the potential backdrop for a new music video.
Stepping into the Music Library at the Central Library in the Ilac Centre visitors can skip through genres via the biographies of musicians, sheet music, vinyl and cds and we’ve also planted copies of Eoin Devereux’s hidden track, along with Audrey Walshe’s botanical response to the show.
In partnership with Musictown, we are also running two very special events, a screen-writing workshop for teenagers with Anne Maree Barry in the Music Library and an historial music tour of the city with Donal Fallon. Bookings through Eventbrite.
In addition to Dublin City Council this exhibition has been supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Inspirational Arts and Oonagh Young Gallery. We would also like to thank Rebecca O’Dwyer, Mark Clare, Liam O’Callaghan, Leagues O’ Toole and Amy Nix (MusicTown) and the Gallery of Photography.
Essay by Pádraic E Moore and Sheena Barrett
The term ‘album’ was adopted into English in the seventeenth century from the Latin phrase album amicorum (meaning ‘album of friends’) to describe a book that collected autographs, drawings or poems. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the term became shorthand for the phonograph record; in the years that followed, it also came to refer to a wave of new formats that arrived in quick succession: cartridge, cassette, compact disc, and the (relatively short lived) MiniDisc. From the sixties onwards, the album became the supreme mode of musical expression, the place where artists pushed boundaries, took risks, and evolved new genres. Today, musicians are still doing this, of course, but the way we listen to recorded music has drastically changed. As one consequence of online streaming, albums are being increasingly replaced by private, personalised playlists. In this, the coherence or intended sequence of an album is undermined, along with, quite possibly, the communal potential of the music itself. Yet while the declining centrality of the album as art form and commodity has changed how music is collected and consumed, there is no doubt that recorded music is as capable as ever of raising consciousness – of taking us out of – and beyond – ourselves, and bringing us together. And there are still legions of us listening to new albums, on repeat, for days on end.
If this exhibition was an album, it would be heterogeneous and epically sprawling: a four-sided affair, maybe something like Prince’s Sign ‘O’ The Times or The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld, featuring a hallucinatory sleeve that you and your friends would stay up all night studying. Obviously, this exhibition – is not – an album; but several of the elements from which it is comprised, such as the hidden track — here taking the form of an essay by the sociologist and writer Eoin Devereux – are conceived in an enthusiastic nod to the format. Like all the best albums, the exhibition is founded on the implicit conviction that music can be a supreme connector, creating hives of likeminded folk and offering the chance of escape from an antagonistic society. At its heart, the project is a testament to musical culture as an unparalleled catalyst for social exchange.
True believers, we celebrate the musical relic and souvenirs of the subculture. Declan Clarke recalls gigs he attended in Dublin in the early nineties; here, he shows an array of ticket stubs and t-shirts collected all those years ago. Of course, these objects hold personal significance for the artist. Yet from a social history perspective, they also represent a seminal moment in the transition of youth culture, at which popular musical taste moved rapidly from indie rock into electronica, and rave scenes emerged. Photos of Clarke taken surreptitiously by his late father in 1991 show the artist surrounded by his posters and cassettes, suggesting how the adolescent’s journey of discovery for belonging in musical worlds can provide a lifelong source of enthusiasm. Alongside Clarke’s paraphernalia, a selection of zines from the Brian McMahon Archive (Brand New Retro) offers insight into how the range of music-related printed matter produced and disseminated offered a focus for communal exchange. While the production quality of these relics varies hugely, it is clear that the determination and desire to contribute to a dialogue and to express enthusiasm is much more urgent than any questions of technique or finish. The real point of these objects was to pass them on in spirited conversion attempts, or to argue about them with friends.
Although different in many ways, the potential and the power of the DIY ethic is also discernible in a series of photographs taken by Anne Maree Barry. These images of underground self-organised parties that took place in the summer of 2003 show a large group of young people sprawled over what might be an island, just as first light breaks. Such parties emerged from a culture of self-organisation and self-sufficiency, with an emphasis, as with their rave precursors, upon inclusion and togetherness facilitated (primarily) through music. While the work could be described as documentary in nature, it should be noted that Barry, as opposed to a voyeur, was an active participant in these events. Looking at them now, it’s striking that no one is using a phone. The images take on a nostalgic tinge, accentuated by the image quality, which conveys a documentary realism in comparison to the filtered smartphone lens used to share experiences with a community not present via Instagram. The parties captured in these photos were relatively rare in a city like Dublin. Indeed, as the city recovers economically and becomes less affordable, such gatherings are becoming even rarer still. Regulation and legislation along with changing land use have put increasing pressure on the viability of nightlife and club culture. The critical nature of this situation has led to the Give Us the Night campaign, who are lobbying to have the value of nightlife, economically and socially, recognised and to counter more conservative leadership that views nightlife and club culture as insignificant or even deviant.
While the aforementioned artists focus on the material remnants and the social milieu that forms around music, others respond to and ‘inhabit’ music much more formally, making work concerned with characteristics aligned with its production: Alan Phelan’s visually striking installation entitled A Joly Screen, the background, for example, made from material usually used in backdrops for photo shoots. In this instance, the RGB ‘curtain’ has been conceived as a backdrop for a music video. Alongside the lastolite stripes (that partially obscure the interior from the exterior) a mattress and some other ‘props’ charge the installation with narrative possibility. As with much of Phelan’s earlier body of work, A Joly Screen, the background, is informed directly by research into historical narratives, and the desire to interrogate the official aspects of these stories[1]. In creating this speculative music video set, he aims to create a site of possibility and potential. Ultimately, this demonstrates his interest in the provisional nature of an artwork as never quite complete, never fully resolved, just about there but not fully. A piece of electronic music composed to accompany Phelan’s mise en scène — something like the excerpt of a soundtrack to an as-yet unmade film — will be presented on the exhibition’s opening night.
A new body of sculptures by Cliodhna Timoney refers to several nightclubs in her hometown of Letterkenny in County Donegal, many of which flourished in the mid to late nineties. Now, some of the clubs are defunct, while others are just about holding on, in a state of clear dilapidation. The titles of Timoney’s assemblages — such as The Golden Grill, The Pulse and Voodoo – are taken directly from the names of these maligned venues. Much like the broader county itself, they have been left behind in the wake of the latest crash, or rendered unviable for the simple lack of young people still living in the area. Her sculptural accumulations are both an homage and formal interpretation of these environments of music and hedonism, where people go to lose themselves and engage in dance-floor catharsis. Scattered throughout the gallery, Timoney’s variegated assemblages suggest the detritus that remains in the aftermath of the party: when the lights are brought up cruelly to mark the night’s end, dazzling us into blindness.
Beyond the original desire to explore collections of musical ephemera, along with artists interested in using music as a referent, much of the thinking around this project has been informed by the writing of cultural theorist Mark Fisher. While his scathing if accurate analysis of contemporary society is somewhat dispiriting, his writing is always balanced by enthusiasm. Nowhere is this more discernible than in his intense, and at times somewhat unlikely, appreciation of popular music. In particular, he was fascinated by popular music’s capacity for “nihilation; the producing of new potentials through the negation of what already exists”[2]. A key concept propagated by Fisher is what he described as ‘popular modernism,’ referring to a kind of culture — often found in music — that merged experimental elements with mainstream modes of production and dissemination. Fisher’s writing undermined the delineation of culture into categories of ‘authentic’ and ‘popular’ and implied that pop culture can also function as a critique, – as opposed to affirmation – of the society from which it emerges.
A similar desire to emphasise the importance of popular music was conveyed by Dan Graham in his seminal video essay Rock My Religion from 1985. At that time, when convergences between visual art and music were reaching unprecedented synergistic peaks, Graham’s essay sought to examine and underscore the importance of certain musical genres of the preceding decade. Proposing a lineage of rock music from the sixties back to certain forms of ritualistic practice and religious worship such as that of the (dancing) Shakers and Quakers, the essay shows popular rock music’s deep capacity for facilitating certain forms of enlightenment and egalitarian togetherness. As he neatly puts it in the essay’s closing lines: “if art is only a business, as [Andy) Warhol suggests, then music expresses a more communal, transcendental emotion which art now denies”. In this sentiment, Rock My Religion is a crucial touchstone for The Last Great Album of the Decade. Much like the film, this exhibition revels in those sacral aspects of popular music that that have (perhaps necessarily) been discarded or denied from the sphere of visual art. It makes room to consider, quite seriously, the profound devotion of the fan, the surrender to cultish following, the fetishistic interest in memorabilia, the communality of the sweaty fray, and perhaps, most importantly, the desire to get lost in “The Thrill of it All”[3].
The Last Great Album of the Decade is co-curated by Pádraic E. Moore (independent curator) and Sheena Barrett (Assistant Arts Officer at Dublin City Council/The LAB Gallery Curator).
[1] This work is informed explicitly by Phelan’s ongoing research into John Joly (1857–1933) one of Ireland’s most eminent scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who made important discoveries in physics, geology and photography. Phelan’s work references the ‘Joly colour process’, one of the first practical methods for colour photography that entailed the use of glass photographic plates with fine vertical red, green and blue lines printed upon them.
[2] k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) edited by Darren Ambrose with Simon Reynolds. Repeater Books. 2018. p.321
[3] The Thrill of It All is a single by Roxy Music featured on their 1974 album Country Life.
Title of work shown:
A Joly Screen, the background, 2019 photographic backdrop paper cut into 15cm widths, vinyl adhesive lettering on windows, cold porcelain hyacinth with acrylic paint in pot on mattress, acrylic on notebook, Joly screen photograph – reverse processed black and white gelatin sheet film, duraclear overlay, acrylic, led panel, supports 14 m long x 5 m high x 3 m deep
The Joly screen photograph is now also titled as: “I can’t hear you”, 2018 image size: 11 x 13cm mounted size: 25.3x26cm
WHEN THE IDEA IS EXTINGUISHED, ATRIUM COMMISSION AT TBG+S, DUBLIN, JULY-SEPTEMBER, 2019 19 July — 07 September 2019
Alan Phelan has been working for the past three years on reviving the Joly Screen process, a forgotten colour photography process invented in the 1890s in Dublin. The Joly Screen image on show is from this new body of work which Phelan has recently begun to exhibit. The photograph comprises two parts – black and white sheet film and a colour screen made from red, green and blue (RGB) stripes. This is not a chemical process but instead filters light on exposure and display to create colour. Phelan’s practice is often site responsive and, for this installation in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios’ Atrium, the windows are striped in RGB to turn the space into a proxy camera body as well as creating a darkened space to view the internal window as a light box. The wall text is a lyric from an upcoming film project by Phelan, which has roots in the poetry of Jean Genet and texts by Samuel Beckett, connecting this installation to a larger body of work.
Alan Phelan holds a Three Year Membership Studio at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (2016-2019). Recent exhibitions include Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork; The Lab, Dublin; and The Hugh Lane, Dublin City Gallery. Forthcoming exhibitions include The RHA, Dublin; Void, Derry, and CCI Paris. He received an Arts Council visual arts bursary in 2017 and the 2019 Creative Award from Meath County Cultural Services funded by Creative Ireland, working with the Dunboyne Flower and Garden Club, which will result in an exhibition at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon in November.
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios’ Atrium connects the public gallery to the individual artists’ private working spaces. Current TBG+S studio artists are invited to use the Atrium to test experimental work or exhibit ideas and artworks in progress.
Powder-coated mild steel letters Front room: 600 wide x 40.4 cm high Rear room: 1200 wide x 37.5 cm high Commission by Dublin City Council 2016-2018 for Kevin Street Library
The wall texts in the front and rear rooms were installed after the renovations of the building in 2018. The texts are quotes about libraries gathered by the artist and through contact with library staff. The artwork picks up on the colours of inks used in book printing – CMYK – cyan, magenta, yellow, and black for the front room and on the colours used for digital screens – RGB – red, green, and blue.
“When in doubt go to the library” JK Rowling
“Paradise will be a kind of library” Jorge Luis Borges
“My archive is a library of longings” Susan Sontag
“A library is a hospital for the mind” Anonymous (Alan Phelan’s choices)
“A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas a place where history comes to life” President Michael D Higgins (Jackie Lynam, Librarian, UNESCO City of Literature Office)
“The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech controversy and community” Paula Poundstone (Angela Cassidy, Divisional Librarian, City Library Project)
“I consider the public library to be along with language and chocolate one of humankinds greatest inventions” John Banville (via email to Cathy Mc Kenna, senior librarian, The International Dublin Literary Award)
This artwork was commissioned by Dublin City Council under the Per Cent for Art Scheme with funding from the Government of Ireland.
Our Kind imagines a future for Roger Casement had he not been executed in 1916. This film is set twenty-five years later in 1941, where Casement is in exile in Norway with his former manservant and now partner Adler Christensen. They are visited by Alice Stopford Green, a close friend and supporter of Casement. The story unfolds as Adler and Alice both betray their relationships with him, paralleling Casement’s isolation from his homeland, beliefs and the ideals of the Rising.
The film is counterfactual – it is based on real people and facts but presented in a different scenario. This in itself reflects the subjectivity common in the genre of historical drama for film or indeed any historical interpretation. Much of the scholarship surrounding Casement is similarly muddled with subjective romanticism, political prejudices and, even still, an inverted homophobia that cannot come to terms with Casement’s personal and public lives. Several of these angles are woven into the story albeit mis-represented, unexplained and ambiguous.
Our Kind gets its title from the iconic speech Casement made on his conviction, and extracts of this speech are used in the film, giving the words new meaning. Similarly, the dialogue re-narrativises subtitles from another film, which like other recent work by Phelan is not openly credited here. Instead the re-staging of the text and dialogue drawn from these sources creates a whole new story. Through apparatus of cinema, the film embraces a complex history and presents a story that needs to be read between the lines. This reflects an outcome of the Rising rather than re-creating or re-enacting an idea of what that history possibly was.
The other works in Gallery 10 attest to the real Casement but again are highly subjective. Extracts from his private, so called, Black Diaries, are presented as white on white wall text. This simple act reveals yet conceals, using full unedited daily entries from published sources. Some of the extracts used here were circulated by the British government during the Appeal and resulted in the loss of public support for Casement. The work in the vitrine touches on the humanitarian yet colonial and imperialist aspects of Casement’s career. The piece is a portrait of the two native Indians from Putamayo who were brought briefly to Britain by Casement in 1910 are represented here by the items for which they were exchanged or purchased for, rather than the actual photographs or painting made of them.
Alan Phelan February 2016
Associated text
Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, Dublin (now called The Hugh Lane Gallery) 10 March – 2 October 2016
Our Kind, HD video duration 30 minutes 1/3 Collection Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane
Ricudo and Omarindo, 2016 Bleached shirt and trousers, custom embroidered label custom made Bridge playing cards 1/10 Collection Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane
Whitewashed Diaries, 2016 black vinyl bar, white vinyl wall text, white paint dimensions variable Collection Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane
Our Kind imagines a future for Roger Casement had he not been executed in 1916. This film is set twenty-five years later in 1941, where Casement is in exile in Norway with his former manservant and now partner Adler Christensen. They are visited by Alice Stopford Green, a close friend and supporter of Casement. The story unfolds as Adler and Alice both betray their relationships with him, paralleling Casement’s isolation from his homeland, beliefs and the ideals of the Rising.
The film is counterfactual – it is based on real people and facts but presented in a different scenario. This in itself reflects the subjectivity common in the genre of historical drama for film or indeed any historical interpretation. Much of the scholarship surrounding Casement is similarly muddled with subjective romanticism, political prejudices and, even still, an inverted homophobia that cannot come to terms with Casement’s personal and public lives. Several of these angles are woven into the story albeit mis-represented, unexplained and ambiguous.
Our Kind gets its title from the iconic speech Casement made on his conviction, and extracts of this speech are used in the film, giving the words new meaning. Similarly, the dialogue re-narrativises subtitles from another film, which like other recent work by Phelan is not openly credited here. Instead the re-staging of the text and dialogue drawn from these sources creates a whole new story. Through apparatus of cinema, the film embraces a complex history and presents a story that needs to be read between the lines. This reflects an outcome of the Rising rather than re-creating or re-enacting an idea of what that history possibly was.
The other works in Gallery 10 attest to the real Casement but again are highly subjective. Extracts from his private, so called, Black Diaries, are presented as white on white wall text. This simple act reveals yet conceals, using full unedited daily entries from published sources. Some of the extracts used here were circulated by the British government during the Appeal and resulted in the loss of public support for Casement. The work in the vitrine touches on the humanitarian yet colonial and imperialist aspects of Casement’s career. The piece is a portrait of the two native Indians from Putamayo who were brought briefly to Britain by Casement in 1910 are represented here by the items for which they were exchanged or purchased for, rather than the actual photographs or painting made of them.
Alan Phelan February 2016
Longer version:
Our Kind is a new film and installation by Alan Phelan. The works are concerned with the legacy of Roger Casement who was one of the leaders of the rebellion in 1916 in Ireland against British rule known as the Easter Rising. He was executed in August 1916 several months after the other fifteen leaders. Despite the failure of the rebellion it did set in motion events that lead to the Republic and is commemorated this year.
This project seeks to circumvent usual commemoration tactics by fictionalising alternatives and shifting timelines while navigating historical and revisionist assessments of Casement. Recent writing contrast him as a naive nationalist or flawed gay icon; an imperialist champion of human rights or self-accepting humanitarian. The history of Roger Casement is much contested and filled with many of the contradictions that surround the entire 1916 commemoration itself.
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane commissioned Phelan in response to the concurrent exhibition which also opens on 9 March High Treason: Roger Casement which is centred on the Sir John Lavery monumental painting depicting the last day of the appeal trial against the sentence of death for treason before five judges of the Court of Criminal Appeal in London. What was essentially a show trial nevertheless produced several complex legal arguments, an iconic conviction speech by the defendant and fall from grace that was kept secret for decades after.
The 30 minute film Our Kind imagines a future for Roger Casement had he not been executed in 1916. It is set twenty-five years later in 1941, where Casement is in exile in Norway with his former manservant and now partner Adler Christensen. They are visited by Alice Stopford Green, a close friend and supporter of Casement. The story unfolds as Adler and Alice both betray their relationships with him, paralleling the isolation of Casement from his homeland, beliefs and the ideals of the Rising.
The film is counterfactual but reflects the subjectivity common in the genre of historical drama for film or indeed any historical interpretation. Much of the scholarship surrounding Casement is similarly muddled with subjective romanticism, political prejudices and, even still, an inverted homophobia that cannot come to terms with the personal and public lives of Casement. Several of these angles are woven into the story albeit mis-represented, unexplained and ambiguous.
Our Kind gets its title from the iconic speech Casement made on his conviction, and extracts of this speech are used in the film and adjacent installation. Similarly, the dialogue re-narrativises the English subtitles from a German film, which like other recent work by Phelan, is not openly credited here. Instead the re-staging of the text and dialogue drawn from these sources creates a whole new story. This allows the work to embrace a complex history and presents a challenge to audiences who need to be read between the lines to understand how fact and fiction have merged. For the artist, his better reflects the possible unforeseen consequences of the Rising rather than re-creating or re-enacting an idea of what that history was, or is believed to have been.
The film embraces the apparatus of cinema with art direction based on 1940s melodrama and the beautifully composed camerawork of Luca Rocchini. Noted Irish actors Bryan Quinn and Gina Moxley are joined by Italian, Aran Bertetto, who perform these stories in static monochrome scenes which are also indebted to the background of Phelan in photography. The film was shot on location in Lough Dan, Co Wicklow and Hardanger Fjord, Norway.
The other works in adjacent gallery attest to the real Casement but again are highly subjective. Extracts from his private, so called, Black Diaries , are presented as white on white wall text. This simple act reveals yet conceals, using full unedited daily entries from published sources. Some of the extracts used here were circulated by the British government during the appeal trial and resulted in the loss of public support for Casement. A further vitrine work touches on the humanitarian yet colonial and imperialist aspects of his career. The piece is a portrait of the two native Indians from Putamayo in Peru who were brought briefly to Britain by Casement in 1910. They are represented here by the items for which they were exchanged or purchased, rather than the photographs or painting made of them during their stay.
A specially commissioned essay titled One of Our Kind by Chris Clarke, Senior Curator at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, is published in the catalogue for High Treason: Roger Casement along with texts by Tacita Dean, Charles Esche, Sinead McCoole and others.
Our Kind was commissioned by Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane/ An Hugh Lane Danlann Chathair Bhaile Atha Cliath.
Funded and supported by Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane/ An Hugh Lane Danlann Chathair Bhaile Atha Cliath; The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaion; Department of Arts, Heritage and The Gaeltacht; 1916-2016 Centenary Programme; An Roinn Ealaion, Oidhreachta agus Gaeltachta /Clar Comortha Cead Bliain; Bank of Ireland; and Fire Station Artists Studios.
A lot of the script and admin files associated with the project were lost in a hard drive breakage but there are two production documents from the film:
