David O’Kane
The Acuity of Blindness
16 January 2016—27 February 2016
Like most of my work »The Acuity of Blindness« was conceived from an unconscious image glimpsed in the corner of my minds eye. I was working on »The Panopticon Pool« series among other projects, so I suppose the preoccupation with water and submersion had a hand in the generation of the idea that floated to the surface. Images often suggest themselves in this way. It appears to be an intuitive form of counterpoint. Proceeding from this fragment of an idea I built the series like an inverse pyramid, through staging and performance, while thinking of the painting and video elements as metafictions that self-consciously refer to themselves and the creation/reception of images.
I tried to keep the various artworks as close to the original unconscious motivation as possible, whilst adapting to concerns of composition and performance throughout the process. I think that the ritualistic transformation of the image as object is an important motif but I also believe that the final artworks transcend this action to become multifarious metaphors. The unconscious foundation of the artwork means that I can never really reach a satisfactory conclusion about the ostensible meaning of the work is. It is an insoluble riddle. However the artworks need not be decoded despite a natural inclination for the mind to generate meaning. Instead we can play with the potentialities through various interpretations or simply experience the artworks as atmospheres, worlds unto themselves, shimmering with possibilities but never finally settling on any given meaning.
»Beltany«, one of the animated video works in the exhibition also arose out of my formal investigations in »The Panopticon Pool« series, especially its preoccupation with circularity. However, in contrast to the claustrophobic enclosure created by the water tank in that series, »Beltany« was staged in an open and expansive landscape. The space in the video is delineated by a prehistoric stone circle that stands on a hill near my childhood home in Donegal, Ireland. The performance was shot in September 2015 and lasted from dawn until dusk, a period of approximately 14 hours. The figure remains central and virtually immobile, pinned in the centre of the camera frame/composition as he is accelerated through time. The rapidity of the animation is contrasted against the immutability of the stone circle, which encompasses him in a completely different temporal form.
—David O’Kane, 2016
I tried to keep the various artworks as close to the original unconscious motivation as possible, whilst adapting to concerns of composition and performance throughout the process. I think that the ritualistic transformation of the image as object is an important motif but I also believe that the final artworks transcend this action to become multifarious metaphors. The unconscious foundation of the artwork means that I can never really reach a satisfactory conclusion about the ostensible meaning of the work is. It is an insoluble riddle. However the artworks need not be decoded despite a natural inclination for the mind to generate meaning. Instead we can play with the potentialities through various interpretations or simply experience the artworks as atmospheres, worlds unto themselves, shimmering with possibilities but never finally settling on any given meaning.
»Beltany«, one of the animated video works in the exhibition also arose out of my formal investigations in »The Panopticon Pool« series, especially its preoccupation with circularity. However, in contrast to the claustrophobic enclosure created by the water tank in that series, »Beltany« was staged in an open and expansive landscape. The space in the video is delineated by a prehistoric stone circle that stands on a hill near my childhood home in Donegal, Ireland. The performance was shot in September 2015 and lasted from dawn until dusk, a period of approximately 14 hours. The figure remains central and virtually immobile, pinned in the centre of the camera frame/composition as he is accelerated through time. The rapidity of the animation is contrasted against the immutability of the stone circle, which encompasses him in a completely different temporal form.
—David O’Kane, 2016