Ronan McCrea's second solo exhibition at Green on Red Gallery introduces a new body of work that continues his recent ‘reprographic’ approach and ironic exploration of the ‘history of photography.’
The current exhibition revolves around a type of silver metallic tape - 3M™ Polyester Film Tape 850 - which had many uses in the now defunct reprographics industry, but is also used as an opaque masking material for film transparencies and slides.
This tape acts as both subject and method for the first iteration of a ten year long project entitled Frieze (the Nineties) 850 that stands as a meditation on art and photography in the 1990s - a period of time crucial to McCrea's formation as an artist. For this work – due for completion in 2023 - the artist has begun the process of creating what he calls 'tape drawings’ onto copies of every edition of Frieze art magazine from 90s. The work is presented on a specially designed shelf that runs the length of a gallery wall.
Themes of masking and revealing are elaborated across two other series presented in the exhibition: the Chroma series of high gloss pack shots, portraits and props set against Chroma-key backgrounds and the Untitled (titles) series of black & white photographic prints which offers a taxonomy of historical exhibitions of photography.
While this exhibition points to new methodologies, the work subtly but purposefully resonates with reoccurring tropes in McCrea’s earlier oeuvre. For instance a concern with dates, eras, decades and the historicisation of personal experience within visual culture can be found in earlier neon ‘date’ sculptures. Similarly, tensions that exist in the work between a desire for totalising taxonomic systems and the incidental, fragmentary and biographical can be traced in earlier textual installations based on natural history collections and projected slide works based on encyclopedias. In this way an underlying relay of connections is suggested in a diverse body of work by the artist which spans twenty years.
