Bea McMahon | Plot | 22 May - 28 June 2014
Opening Reception: Thurs 22 May, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
(Green On Red Gallery: 6:00 - 8:00 pm; Unit 4, James Joyce Street, Dublin 1: 7:00 - 9:00 pm)
Exhibition Dates: 22 May - 28 June 2014
Green On Red Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new work by Bea McMahon on Thursday, May 22, 2014.
The opening reception will span two venues: Green On Red Gallery (Lombard Street) from 6-8 pm and Unit 4, James Joyce Street, Dublin 1 from 7-9 pm.
The passage of the idea in the visual arts is coextensive with the showing of a material form with a contour. In McMahon’s new works the gallery space becomes the site of translation or metaphor or legislative definition, the traces left by enacting/uttering a fixed text on the spatial sets become the material that drives a plot or plot matrix.
The Green on Red will hold the props and plot drawings in the Lombard Street Gallery while a moving image workThe Fixed Point2014, a play uttered for the props, will be set across the water in Unit 4, James Joyce Street.
A notion of intrigue and the audience’s ability to make identifications generated byplot, leave traces or shudders that manifest themselves in the physical realm.
The shudder McMahon refers to is to match the force of a spoken text with the theatricality of political language, economic language and the language of desire which enters the real and the active. Our democratic ideals rest on giving politicians’ uttered speech the mandate to become action. For a person to use the language of both the sophist (written) and politician (action) is almost impossible. In this work the artist wants to drive the legislative power of naming with its qualities of fluidity, craftiness, honour, fixity, rudeness, and insistence to the point of absurdity.
Alain Badiou prophesises that theatre is heading towards an austere mathematics. As a political instrument it is also bound to the state – as an art it will always be a site divided between subversion and institution, contemplative passivity and active rupture– a complex ordering system.
The artist will develop some of these ideasIn Conversationwith Jaki Irvine in the Lombard Street East gallery on Saturday, May 24th at 1.30pm. All welcome.
Please note, the exhibition will continue only in Unit 4, James Joyce Street from Tuesday May 27th until June 28th next. The props and plot drawings in Lombard Street are on view for one week only.