Green On Red Gallery is pleased to announce a show of new work by Fergus Feehily, which opens to the public on 18 March and runs until 16 April 2005.
Feehily has on several occasions quoted the singer Shirley Collins: "these ideas I have are like some of the songs-they have blurred edges...". This question of a blurring of edges is reflected not only in his overlapping and questioning of boundaries between drawing and painting but also in the complexities of looking; the disparity between the image and the construction of the image.
"I suppose I¹m quite interested in looking," Feehily comments, "and how we look, and hopefully some of the work can encourage that looking. Some of them are quite slow. One of the significant things about the paintings is that they often appear to be one thing and then show themselves to be something else. In a faint, or quiet painting, it can show itself to be quite loud. Or the ones that seem to have been made very quickly, as if the marks are perhaps arbitrary in some way, actually show themselves to be highly planned. The way in which it¹s made contradicts this idea. It looks like it could be a pencil drawing on the painting, but actually they are masked lines of paint."
Their sources and reasons for being are seemingly disparate and for Feehily they are. Works with semi-obscured letters sit alongside paintings which appear to be based on Venn-diagrams. Indeed, Venn-diagrams may offer a very simple opening to this work, in that they are about making connections, both in the individual works but also within the show itself. It could be said that Feehily makes works which refer to systems of various kinds, both organic and man-made, yet it is the surprising connections he makes or eludes to that show themselves to be at their heart most playful and anti-systematic.
Fergus Feehily completed his MFA in 2002 in Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Recent exhibitions include the solo show Tender Analysis (2004) in Yanagisawa Gallery, Tokyo, and group exhibitions Dublin Connection (2004), Galerie Michael Sturm, Stuttgart, and Colour Chart (2003) and Perspective (2004), Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast.
A Venn Notebook, a new book on Fergus Feehily¹s work designed by Ciarán O Gaora including an essay by David Toop, published by i.s + ZERO-G, will be launched on the opening night.
Fergus Feehily will be in conversation with Sarah Durcan in the gallery on Wednesday 23 March at 7 pm.
For further information please contact Jerome O Drisceoil, Georgina Jackson, Caoimhe Kilfeather or Jennifer Phelan at: