STILL
Mary FitzGerald
November 13 - December 12, 2015
Opening Reception : Thursday 12th November 6 - 8 pm
Green On Red Gallery, Park Lane, Spencer Dock, Dublin 1.
STILL
Mary FitzGerald
12 November - 12 December 2015
Green On Red Gallery is delighted to welcome STILL, an exhibition of new work by Mary FitzGerald. Like her previous solo show in the gallery, HALFLIFE in 2012, it is an exhibition of uncompromising ambition, combining large-scale installation with individual, smaller works.
STILL addresses the new gallery and the architecture of Park Lane like no exhibition previously. Through a number of basic alterations to the gallery layout and further interventions the viewer is entered into an all-embracing and qualitatively new encounter with time and space.
Mirrors and mirror images had the effect of distorting the architecture on a smaller scale in works by the artist like Self-portrait with spine (2014), photo-collage on mirror, in the inaugural group exhibition, Renew, in Spencer Dock in December, 2014. These self-portrait mirror wall works were completely dependent on the live moment and the presence of the viewer. When the viewer disconnected, moved on to the next work, something necessary and live ceased as decisively and abruptly as a scene change. These self-portraits also had the effect, from a distance, of puncturing the architecture while at the same time reflecting and capturing it. When you moved so did the reflecting voids.
Similar disruptions and constructions operate in STILL. As you enter cameras are rolling. The encounter is “on".
The gallery has been turned around and FitzGerald uses and explores corners and hidden spaces in the large new premises as opportunities for enhanced dialogue and replay. Subject becomes object and consciousness becomes self-consciousness through a loop not out of place in post-structuralist film. The aim here is to draw the viewer’s attention to ways of being in the world. The idea of passage is central – and appeared in the previous exhibition. Passage is also a core principal in Shintoism, made up of "spirit" and "to" or action. For this reason thresholds appear and reappear in STILL where each space in the gallery has been marked and constructed to suggest different realms and different layers of reality. Still mirror “paintings“ stand sentry as you step through incense towards the gallery’s patio. They echo the inhaling and exhaling kami in Shinto temples. One painting delicately holds a barely discernible x suspended between its four corners while its opposite contains an equally fragile “in“.
No surface is dormant or inactive. The gallery’s new furniture glows increasingly with a vivid pink fluorescence the more the room darkens repeating the balancing act between opposite forces that are held in vertiginous tension throughout STILL.
The artist’s series of new Still paintings are boxed and/or mirrored mixed media works with depictions or assemblages of interior worlds caught in real time with the most minimal of means.