Bandits Live Comfortably in the Ruins
3 March – 2 April | Opening 2 March, 6.30–8.30pm
Flat Time House presents Bandits Live Comfortably in The Ruins, curated by Irish artist Sean Lynch. The exhibition broadly explores the attitudes that underpin human relationships to the environment. There is no masterplan of coherence here, or indeed any transcendental experience to be had. Instead, a series of artistic positions, objects and artefacts bargain and improvise through hard-won perseverance and novel invention. This loose grouping proposes no tranquil uniformity or comforts of identifying with history and heritage. Instead, everything constantly mutates, and nothing ever stays the same. Including works by Seanie Barron, Stephen Brandes, John Carson, Burke Kennedy Doyle, Michele Horrigan, Sam Keogh, John Latham, Fiona Marron, Eilis O’Connell, Freek Wambacq and materials from Country Life and British Telecom.
Image: Burke Kennedy Doyle’s 1996 model for the Sonas (translated from Irish as ‘happiness’) Centre. Courtesy Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin. Photo: Plastiques Photography
Freek Wambacq, Hitting, Knocking, Sleeping, Punching. Photo: Plastiques Photography
Burke Kennedy Doyle’s design for a Las Vegas-styled casino in Dublin features a mock-up megalithic stone circle built beside a bus stop. John Latham’s monumental scheme for post-industrial Scotland is presented alongside a 1989 Country Life article proposing to dress up petrol stations as rustic cabins or middle-eastern minarets. Sam Keogh’s sculptures resemble post-apocalyptic mobile phones, while rumours of a British Telecom museum dedicated to vandalised telephone boxes still abound. Fiona Marron’s video alludes to how science fiction directly influences futures trading in Chicago.
Seanie Barron finds wood in hedges and bushes, before fashioning it into walking sticks full of serendipitous anthropomorphic forms. Michele Horrigan and Eilis O’Connell explore how modifications and changes to particular sites over time are manifested. Stephen Brandes deconstructs the ideals of Hegel and dialectical progress in a car park in Scotland. John Carson’s artistic pursuits investigate the social significance of alcohol and kebabs, while Freek Wambacq’s performative sculpture can be encountered daily at the nearby Flock and Herd butchers on Bellenden Road.
A publication designed by Wayne Daly will be freely available.
Bandits Live Comfortably In The Ruins forms part of a series of ongoing shows curated by Sean Lynch that investigate how friction, juxtaposition and individual agency shape and influence the contemporary environments we inhabit. Recent exhibitions by Lynch include the Venice Biennale, Modern Art Oxford and the Camden Arts Centre. In London, he is represented by the Ronchini Gallery. The exhibition is supported by Culture Ireland as part of its Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme, and by Lismore Castle Arts.
Photo: Plastiques Photography
Image: Fiona Marron, After Automation
Seanie Barron, Briar stick resembling a goat's head
Image: John Carson, A Bottle of Stout in Every Pub in Buncrana
Eilis O'Connell, The Contemporary Condition of The Great Wall of Kinsale, 1989. Photo: Plastiques Photography
Stephen Brandes, Hegel Bollard, 2016. Photo: Plastiques Photography
Michele Horrigan, After Beranger, 2015. Photo: Plastiques Photography
John Carson, Kebabarama, 1999. Photo: Plastiques Photography
Country Life Magazine, 20 September 1990 Presented as a collection of slides detailing aspects of Giles Worsley's article 'Is Banality Inevitable?'. Photo: Plastiques Photography
Sam Keogh, Untitled, 2015. Photo: Plastiques Photography