September 7th - October 21st 2007 Here, And Nowhere Else - Michael Minnis
The images in the album are central to the development of the exhibition, and are explored through a diverse series of processes; cropped and painted, re-photographed on site in Dnipropetrovs’k and re-presented as video. The work explores memory, time and displacement.
Dnipropetrovs’k was a ‘closed city’ until the 1990s because of its military significance incorporating nuclear, arms and space industries. The ‘original’ reproductions that Minnis uses as a starting point have a dream-like unreal quality, distorted in various ways, through a super-saturated colour, fading, and the patterns of the inks on the paper. These dated photographs of buildings, people and boats form a fabricated image, a kitsch record. History and time become displaced in a process of selection and reproduction by the artist.
A video installation occupies the North gallery, where two sunrises unfold, while another narrative develops through a series of slides. Minnis visited Dnipropetrovs’k in the last few months of preparation for the exhibition to search for sites that were familiar from the photographs. One spectacular find was a concrete circus building. The slides show the plaza, the empty spaces where groups of people sat, and the deserted circus, empty apart from cleaners and dusty, stuffed animals fallen off of their mounts.
EVENTS:
Michael Minnis Artist’s talk Thursday 20th September at 1:00 pm.
The exhibition Here, and Nowhere Else, will be accompanied by a brochure with an essay by Dr. Gavin Murphy.
Family Day with artist Michael Minnis. Saturday 15th September 11.30am-4:00pm. Art Activities for children with artist Michael Minnis. Children must be accompanied by an adult. Free of charge, booking is recommended. Please email artgallery@limerickcity.ie.
Biographical Notes:
Michael Minnis was born in Belfast in 1964 and currently lives in Clare. He studied Fine Art at the University of Ulster and Manchester Metropolitan University. He is a lecturer in Fine Art Painting at GMIT, Galway. He was awarded the PS1 Fellowship 1994-1995. Recent solo exhibitions include Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast, Dunamaise Art Centre, Port Laois and. Group exhibitions include The Disembodied Eye: Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art, Golden Thread gallery, Belfast (2006) and ev+a 2006 give (a) way.
