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Eamon O'Kane
‘Unseen'
Solo Exhibition
1st March - 1st may 2008
click here to download the catalogue in pdf format
‘Unseen’ is a solo exhibtion by Eamon O’Kane of recent work not previously shown in Ireland.Eamon O’Kane (b. 1974) studied in Dublin, Belfast and New York. He has exhibited widely and is the recipient of many awards and scholarships including the Taylor Art Award, The Tony O’Malley Award and a Fulbright Award. In 2005 he received an EV+A open award from Dan Cameron (Senior Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York) and in 2006 he was shortlisted for the AIB Prize and received a Pollock Krasner foundation grant. In 2006 O’Kane has shown in a major exhibition of contemporary painting at the Burda Museum solo shows in GFJK, Baden Baden and Galerie Schuster, Berlin.
Installation views, Cavanacor 2008
Eamon O'Kane, an exceptionally prolific and capable artist, has titled his solo show The Philosophy of Furniture. His starting point was a piece written by Edgar Allen Poe for Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1840. The piece seems to be lighter than the headline might suggest, offering a critique of American furniture. O'Kane seems to be primarily interested in pursuing his own preoccupation with the natural and the fabricated.
Previously he has explored the siting of Modernist architectural structures, whether grandly public, or more domestic and personal, in natural settings.
The drawings, animations and laser etchings here are inventive explorations of the dialogue between manufacturing and natural processes. His large-scale drawings of trees are made with charcoal - burnt wood - on paper that is derived from cellulose. Most of the trees are conifers, presumably grown in managed plantations for use in construction. Each laser etching features one item of furniture. The image is burned through a layer of paint so that it is formed by the substance of the masonite board beneath, composed of the rendered fragments of the conifers.extract from 'Deep immersion in the world' Review by Aidan Dunne, Irish Times, Jan. 2007
Installation views, Cavanacor 2008
‘O’Kane’s collective term in 2003 for a number of works was Fictionlands and was used as an umbrella title for an exhibition. The Studio in the Woods, 2003, is a series of paintings, which betray in lush colour a sense of fantasy, taking a cue from reproduced images of renowned designed examples. These explore the desire to find the perfect space in which to work creatively: a place that is frustratingly impossible as the aura of that ideal can rarely translate into the quotidian requirements of an artist’s studio. This last area of fascination for O’Kane is developed in The Mobile Museum into a decidedly understated reflection on the imperatives that drive artists to consider how their work relates to the spaces it occupies at various points of its journey. The relationship between where the work is made, stored, displayed and the work’s own sense of space is a common cause for deliberation among artists. Often struggling to overtake architecture on a daily practical basis, artists attempt to reclaim the spaces they work in as distinctly their own and further do battle to overcome the atmosphere of the places where their work is revealed to the wider community. Artists generally agree that the size of a studio implicates the scale and concerns of the work, therein and thereafter. Perhaps it was also O’Kane’s proximity to the galleries at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, while on residency there during 2004, which propelled his work to increase in size. The very scale of the paintings in The Mobile Museum presents a way of looking that encourages the viewer to move through the gallery space: standing back at a distance from the work to incorporate its full view, and moving up close to see in detail the range of painted marks created within each one. This physical change was coupled with a newly restricted monotone palette. The use of black and white suggests the language of drawing, plans, the retrospective view of photography.extracts from ‘Art as Spatial Resistance’ by Niamh Ann Kelly, Lecturer DIT
Installation views, Cavanacor 2008
In a later body of work, O’Kane’s eye looks afresh at the promises of architecture and the dreams we hold of place. He explores suburban development, and the uneasy balance achieved between nature and cement. He looks at the created cultures of the shopping mall and the arts centre, and at the artificial, ersatz ‘countryside’ landscaped around them. Through painting, drawing, animation and the intriguingly magical construction of the Panorama, O’Kane presents a picture of time and place in flux, where the past and future mingle. A tree, tall and beautifully drawn, grows up the full height of an interior wall of the Draíocht gallery, while outside the ‘real’ tree, from which this one was copied slowly loses its leaves with the approach of winter.’
extract from 'How We Live' by Gemma Tipton
Installation views, Cavanacor 2008
