4037 St. Claude Ave., New Orleans, LA 70117
Post- Fordlândia is a series of films and photographic works exploring the ruins of Fordlândia, Henry Ford’s failed utopian, white-picket town constructed in 1928 in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest. Fordlândia, a now abandoned American town exists as the most poignant existing monument to Ford’s attempt to export his puritanical model of capitalism “Fordism” and the American way of life into other parts of the world. Whilst Ford’s vision was at once protecting even parental, it was utterly totalitarian, and as industrialized processes became increasingly global, the flaws in Ford’s logic began to erode the fabric of his utopian dream. As the ensuing disasters mounted, Ford’s aims for Fordlândia became increasingly obsessed by idealism, as if he sensed that the growing failure of Fordlândia was an apocalyptic premonition that threatened to destroy his vision of the world saved by capitalism.
Post- Fordlândia is a series of works exploring the space between fiction, documentary, and subjective observation that contemplates the physical and ideological failure of the exportation of the capitalist dream into one of the most complex ecological and cultural places on the planet.
Biography:
Megs Morley and Tom Flanagan are visual artists based in Galway, Ireland. Their collaborative practice is primarily concerned with the exploration of cultural and political contexts and sites through the expanded use of artists cinema, cinematic space, documentary, fiction and experimental film. Their approach to moving image is multifaceted and experimental and plays with the forms and tropes of both fiction and non-fiction film. Their work explores a
self-reflexive inquiry into the medium of film, and attempts to complicate potential readings surrounding the documentation of politically complex sites and contexts thereby creating a criticality on the relationship between
images, history and memory.
Morley and Flanagan both studied Fine Art Sculpture in LSAD before completing Masters in Visual Arts Practices in IADT, 2008. Their work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in both gallery and film festival contexts. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Galway Arts Centre, June 2011(Solo), Rencontres Internationales: Paris: Centre Pompidou November 2011. A Series of Navigations curated by Seamus Kealy, The Model, Sligo. Upcoming: Rencontres Internationales : Berlin - July 2012, Mermaid Arts, Wicklow, (Solo Exhibition) 2013. Public Commissions include “Aughty, a Film in 4 Parts” a feature length film, commissioned by Aughty Public Art Projects and Galway County Council, due to premiere July 21st 2012.
Harvest Reprise: Holger Lang
The European artist and filmmaker is living and working close to a river.
Taking and making images that will rustle and hustle the soul of the beholder.
Wayfarer and collector of onerous secrets and decelerating mysteries.
Instant recognition of the true records from your polaroid past.
Little stories contained in the remains of your invisible life, traveling from iris to iris.
Leaves falling from a shady tree of sugar, phony money and a silver moon.
Spirits reflected in the artificial eyes, originals and no more sentimental relics.
Skylark and Orion's Haven, arriving at Bridgend around 12:27.
Plastic stars that shine like gold in the crescent of the summer sun.
Airy phantoms in the critic's dream, access granted for all the jolly and good children.
Complementary insights and respectable revelations from private places and unknown cities.
Vintage photographs from nostalgic Vicary Street and Lon-Y-Cariadon in North Cornelly.
The hazy map to the unreadable granary that might still garner your heart.
Wickerwork and gossamer rumors filling the room with endearing songs.
Just focus on the day, the archer and the laureate.
www.holgerlang.com
Island of Ghosts: Eamon Colman
Painting for me is a way of offering food for thought and analyse where I dwell. Not where I sit or stand but where and how I perceive the landscape that I am observing. In other words, I use painting as a way of understanding the world around me. This observation manifests itself through the mark making. Marks that at first seem random and unconnected, over time and with observation start to resemble a landscape.
I choose not to represent the figure in my work but rather adopt a reductionist method of mark making with a layer of contemplation and personal understanding of what the landscape is trying to convey. It’s history, an analogue of events that make up a local landscape.
In Ireland landscape is like the local page where the history of a people is written. Because of this I have painted the same geographical area around my home for the last nine years. This landscape has with in its pages "holy wells " which are very old places of worship, old mills and ruins from around the time of the Irish Famine. It is also a place of water from mountain streams and full-blown rivers that meander slowly to the sea. These rivers create a natural and an historic habitat. The agricultural use of the land changes too as it makes its way to the sea.
Uses of language change with the different forms of “husbandry” too, an example of this is the word used for a garden fork. In some areas the word "sprong" is used, while in the more hilly areas the word "grape" is used. Both of these garden forks have a slightly different shape as they do slightly different jobs. The landscape has helped change that language too. Now of course television and the car, have, alongside modern farming methods changed the landscape but enough has survived in pockets to be of interest.
It is in these pockets I focus my attention in paint, the gaps, those windows to the past. The title “Island of Ghosts” refers to these pockets within the landscape, some of which seem to have been forgotten by man, an allusion a ghost on the landscape, a shadow. Ireland is full of ghosts, but my question here is-are ghosts real or a conjurers trick, a flick of light or something from our past? Place names are like hidden histories, a reminder of an event or a natural “place of shadows” which in Gaelic means “Ait na Scathanna”.
The phenomenon of ghosts exists all around us and has been taken up by romanticism and writers from the past such as Goethe, Schiller and others. The ghost stands aloof, is looking for a way forward or perhaps for forgiveness. The ghost is also a signpost, an instructor from the past in the present and sometimes an object of contemplation.
The fact that humans take the time to remind themselves that the idea of beauty still exists and that these ideas still have meaning - manifest in place names are universally found; from new housing estates to old mountains. While a lot of these places where humans remind themselves of beauty are sacred, it is not the sacred that I paint, but a search for the beautiful. Painting is an attempt to invoke the spirit, to look at places that are beyond the sphere of the everyday but at the same time are part of us all.
Biography
Born in Dubln in 1957 Eamon Colman studied at Trinity College and NCAD. He was elected a member of Aosdana in 2007 in recognition of his outstanding contribution to culture in Ireland. He is regarded as one of Ireland’s foremost abstract painters and deemed by Aidan Dunne (Art Critic - The Irish Times) as “unmistakably a colourist”. He has guest lectured at Webster University, St Louis MA and in Vienna. He has hosted the Drawing Studies Programme at The National Gallery for 8 years, winning the AIB Better Ireland Award in 2000 resulting in a documentary on his teaching methods by Fronteer Films shown on RTE. Through the Irish Museum of Modern Art outreach programme he hosted art classes for 8 years with a women’s refuge in Bluebell, Dublin and was a mentor at Pavee Point, Dublin.
Colman has won many awards including a one year travel award to India by the Calcutta Artists’ Union, in 1989 he
won first prize in EV& A Limerick, in 2001 he won first prize in painting at Eigse, Carlow. He was the first Irish artist to
win a full fellowship to The Vermont Studio Centre, USA. Amongst his numerous awards from The Arts Council of Ireland he won a Major Artist Bursary in 1995 to exhibit in New York, a CCAT Interreg Major Award in 2005 to tour an exhibition in Wales.
Since 1980 Colman has had over 30 solo exhibition in Ireland and abroad including his “mid term” retrospective at The R.H. A. Gallery in 1997 invited by Ciaran Mc Gonigal. He has exhibited widely abroad at The Cecille R. Hunt Gallery, St. Louis, USA in 2008, Oriel Queen’s Hall Gallery, Wales 2010 & 2006, Vermont Studio Centre Gallery 2002 amongst shows at the Miami Art Fair, Novas Gallery, Liverpool as part of it’s Capital of Culture 2008 amongst shows in Hong Kong, Philadelphia, Brussels, London and Madrid. In 2010 he was invited to exhibit at Rua Red where he made 12 large scale square paintings for the cube space. Future shows in April 2012 at Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin.
His work is in all major corporate and private collections. More viewing of his work Eamon Colman, Artist Profile Book – Gandon Editions no. 25. He is represented by Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin. To view more visit:
www.eamoncolman.com
www.hillsborofineart.com
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