Forthcoming

The first paragraph of my review of Alice Maher's major show 'Becoming' at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, published in the April edition of Frieze 2013.

This selection of works by Alice Maher, stretching from when she emerged in the late 1980s to today, was not a standard retrospective as such. Instead, the exhibition figured new relationships within the artist’s oeuvre, a rationale that was made clear by its title, ‘Becoming’. Maher’s interest in capturing the material qualities of transformation and the capacity of images and objects to register beguiling, resonant interest is not conducive to a historic or academic overview. Furthermore, as curator Sean Kissane notes in his accompanying essay, ‘Becoming’ contributes to the ongoing narrative of IMMA’s temporary space at the historic Earlsfort Terrace (which, among other uses, was the premises of University College Dublin for more than 100 years). One could, however, also argue that the significance of Maher’s career for contemporary art in Ireland over the last 20 years is not reducible to the details of its parts...

Myself and Steve Dutton's - of the University of Lincoln - exhibition of 20 artists has been extended to May 26th at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center. It's titled 'Possession (1)' and artists often contact me after a show opens. Here are two works by Justin Mills:

'God As Birth, Life, Death', 2010 rubber-modified bitumen, oil, acrylic, on canvas, 100 x 100 cm (credit: Rirkrit Tiravanija, 'Born, Live, Die', 2010, printed matter on a table)

'God As 18th Century Persian Calligraphy', 2010, rubber-modified bitumen, oil, acrylic, on canvas, 100 x 100 cm (credit: Abdul Majid Talighani, Persian Shikasteh Style Calligraphy, 18th Century)

Liam Morgan sent me the following image and email this morning:

It's a found-object piece I did entitled 1992.  The found objects are a bunch of negatives I found in an abandoned building, along with some bits of old wood I came across.  The pictures were from the construction of the building; they were taken in 1992. The photographer is unknown, but it would have been someone from the construction company taking 'evidence' photographs of the work in progress.  Of course the building was never finished. 

They were taken with one of those cameras which stamps the date on the negatives.  So, assuming the camera was set up properly, we know that the images were made on Feb 26th, 1992 and the negatives sat in the unfinished building until I picked them up 20 years later.  There are a lot of aspects of this that interest me.  Initially, that these were 'disposable images'; they were made to demonstrate evidence of a problem.  Once the problem was described to whoever needed to know about the problem, the images were no longer useful to anyone.  But because they are physical objects, their life went beyond their intended purpose and they changed and took on a life of their own.  And then I came across them and turned them into something very different from their original author's intended lot-in-life.  

In someways this is a pondering on the massive paradigm shift we have seen in the way people produce and consume photographs; images have become a means of communicating experience in (almost) real-time, rather than something captured to be kept and reminisced at some point in the future.  They are a spoken conversation, rather then the written letter they once were.  In fact, the photographs that make up 1992 were made in a similar spirit to how many people create photographs now; they are unintenional fore-runners of this great digital shift of visual literacy.