Victor Sloan: Selected Works
West Cork Arts Centre, Ireland.
10 October to 2 November 2003
This is a major exhibition of Sloan’s work examining the whole range of his photographic practice in which he has been engaged over the past twenty years.
Throughout this time Sloan has been particularly associated with a body of work which has explored the Orange Order and its marching season. While the exhibition acknowledges the significance of this series of work it also aims to reassess earlier and later works, the Craigavon series, the Circusseries, which present a much broader area of study.Victor Sloan’s photographic work has substantially consisted of a hybridisation of painting and photography. He was also conscious that, in exhibiting photographs in an art context, people might dismiss them as being "just photographs", and he instinctively wanted to make that kind of response difficult, to present the viewer with something photographic that was not exactly a photograph.
Most of Sloan’s work is firmly rooted in Northern Ireland, in its subject matter and its immediate concerns. He has moved from the subject matter of Belfast zoo to treat an expanding range of paradigmatic social spaces and environments, including the resort town of Bangor, the new city of Craigavon, the field in which the Orange Order marchers congregate, the circus and the sports stadium.
In the light of everything he has done since Belfast Zoo, it is reasonable to conclude that the marks, the various kinds of interference, so to speak, that disrupt the optimal clarity of the image, make visible the usually invisible substrata, the sectarianism, the workaday tensions, the implicit threat of violence, underlying the apparent normality of life in Northern Ireland. More, there is perhaps the implication that just as the images sometimes seem to be consumed from within, specific political and cultural groupings in Northern Ireland might be poisoned by their own histories or their own historical myths.
Equally, we can read even the spatial fabric of the prints as representative…of emblematic environments - and the marks and strains wrought upon the photographic negatives and subsequent prints equate to tensions and breaks in the social fabric itself.
Postal Address
West Cork Arts Centre
North Street
Skibbereen
Co Cork
Ireland
Phone: + 353 28 22090
Fax: + 353 28 23237
email: info@westcorkartscentre.com
Web:,www.riverbank.ie/
Opening Hours
Monday - Saturday
10.00 am - 5.00 pm
Directions The West Cork Arts Centre is accessible by taking the N71 from Cork through Bandon and Clonakilty. Situated beside St. Patricks Cathedral.
This article comes from Talk Ireland
