Green On Red Gallery is delighted to announce its third solo exhibition of new work by Ronan McCrea opening on Thursday, 1st December 2016 and running until to 21st January 2017.
MATERIAL(s) is an installation of projected 16mm film-works and photography, bringing together recurrent concerns in McCrea’s diverse artistic practice. These include investigations into the appropriated and found image, celluloid materiality, reproduction and indexicality, artistic and personal genealogies and the institutions and processes of pedagogy.
The starting point for this body of work is a collection of instructional 16mm films on mechanical engineering produced by the BBC in 1972. Its scope covers educational documentaries on other topics, including a film about the sculptor Henry Moore. All were salvaged by the artist from a college engineering department in the wake of film's obsolesce as a didactic tool.
Through a laborious process of cutting and splicing of this found material, McCrea draws on tropes taken from avant-garde Structural film - also from the 1970s - from the Cut-Up and from the procedures of early Conceptual art, re-constituting the fragments into new formations, with new affinities. The resultant works, which are material objects as much as images, stage the apparatus of projection, looping and spectatorship in response to the scale and raw interior of the gallery’s architecture.
Ronan McCrea (b. 1969, Dublin) is an artist working with photography, moving image, architecture and social space. He has been making exhibitions and projects in galleries, museums and public contexts for over twenty years.
Selected exhibitions and projects include We Are Center, CSS Bard College New York (2016); Medium (Corporate Entities) 2008/15 in Fragments, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2015); Venn/Chroma Enclave Gallery, London (2014); Exiles, Lab Gallery Dublin (2013); solo exhibitions at Green on Red Gallery (2013 & 2011); Autodidact screenings at Cologne Kunstverein and Cobra Museum, Netherlands (2011); School Play a public art commission for a CETNS school in Dublin (2009); We are Grammar, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, (2011); School Days, Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2010-11); Sinopale 3, Sinop Biennial, Turkey (2010); Coalesce: Happenstance, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam (2009); Nameless Science, Apexart, New York (2008); Ireland at the Venice, 52nd Venice Biennale (2005); general-specific Project Arts Centre (2003); Seminal Glassbox Paris (2002). His work is represented in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon, UCD, OPW, as well as numerous private collections. McCrea is a lecturer in Fine Art at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT).
