SEAMUS HARAHAN, LORRAINE NEESON, TOM SMITH, NADIM VARDAG, MICHAEL JOHN WHELAN

PREVIEW FRIDAY 15 FEBRUARY 2013, 6-7.30PM

16 FEBRUARY – 23 MARCH 2013

OPEN FRIDAYS & SATURDAYS 1-5PM

FLOOD announces its second exhibition Backwards into Paradise. The exhibition takes its lead from artists working with video and film, expanding out to an exploration of light and darkness, facts and fictions via narrative and metaphor. The exhibition uses moments of the everyday and sublime which suggest a greater global significance and meaning.

Seamus Harahan‘s Before Sunrise is an experiment in response to On a Beautiful Day, a film made at the Berlin Wall by artist KP Brehmer in 1969. He was asked by a friend to retrace a walk and to record it on film. Harahan was asked by a fellow artist to do the same through Alexandra Park in North Belfast. He was given a super-8 camera and one reel of film. The camera leads the viewer to a peace line separating the neighbouring communities.

Lorraine Neeson engages thematically with the reversal and inversion of light and darkness. Working with light, sound, video installation and architectural intervention, Neeson’s environments disrupt and disorient a conventional sense of spatial and temporal logic, creating an environment of ambiguity in which illusion and reality are interwoven by means of reflection, shifting shadows, projected light and disembodied sound. For Flood Neeson presents a black neon piece, The End, subverting notions of light and dark in this show of optical revealing and suggestion.

Tom Smith’s work is concerned with images supplanting the subjects they represent, becoming objects in their own right. This change in status can be due to the image failing to maintain its distance, or by developing it’s own history upon which subsequent representations will be based. xoFyrutneCht02presents a short looping animation of the 20th Century Fox logo, in a 360 degree view. As the camera moves around the back of the logo, it reveals an unfinished structure, blowing the myth of the image and cinematic tradition it encapsulates. The endless circling only serves to reinforce the anticipation and futility of looking and expectation.

Nadim Vardag‘s work at first seems to devote itself to the cinema: film images appear as decontextualized loops running to no more than a few seconds, appropriated from motion pictures such as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Salaire de la Peur (1953). In the short loop Zoetrop he examines the operation and effect of the zoetrope, an early optical animation device creating an illusion of movement. Although the cinematic frame of reference is not explicitly specified and the origins of the plots and sources are only rarely named, the film resonates with the unsteadily flickering dawn of cinema.

Michael John Whelan works predominately in video and photography and most recently in film and drawing. For his moving-image works Whelan is interested in the nature of film and video to create an experience of duration and act as a physical recorder of mark-making. For Flood Whelan presents a new video work, Mercer (2013, 21 min, continuous loop, silent). Filmed at an abandoned building site on the edge of Dubai, this work presents a segment of time played out forward and in reverse. Like the actions of the work’s namesake, Wilbur Mercer from the novels of Philip K. Dick, the action of sunset and artificial sunrise are infinitely repeated.

FLOOD is a not for profit exhibition space curated by Paul McAree. Previous projects include Turn to Red, an exhibition featuring Maryam Jafri, Stephen Gunning, Jim Ricks, Sean Lynch and Suzanne Treister; a commissioned publication by Kevin Atherton, and projects with Theresa Nanigian, Terry Atkinson and Flávia Müller Medeiros.

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FLOOD is kindly supported by Dublin City Council, Arts Office and Lismore Castle Arts