Events: Visual Arts

Curated by Cliodhna Shaffrey, Flicks takes place in three venues in Drogheda

Highlanes Gallery (J. Tobias Anderson, Martin Healy, Nicholas Jasmin, Christian Marclay, Bea McMahon, Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg, Paul Pfeiffer); Droichead Arts Centre @ Stockwell Street (Suky Best and Rory Hamilton) and Drogheda Railway Station (Jenny Brady)

Flicks
the cinematic in art

J. Tobias Anderson, Suky Best and Rory Hamilton, Jenny Brady, Martin Healy, Nicholas Jasmin, Christian Marclay, Bea McMahon, Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg, Paul Pfeiffer.

Flicks – the cinematic in art – brings together work of nine artists who draw on and are inspired by film to create new original works of high imagination. The programme, includes a series of short video and sound works by Irish and internationally acclaimed artists. In many of the works the artists have appropriated directly from film so what emerges from their mixing desks are tautly arranged compositions that form alternative yet surprisingly coherent narratives. In other works the emphasis on creating a new expression is through hand drawn video animations – where the artists have decided what to include or discard from the cinematic image.

WEDNESDAY 29 APRIL FILM

Drogheda Arts Festival presents

North by Northwest

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason

Date Wed 29th April
Time 8pm
Venue Droichead Arts Centre, Stockwell Street Theatre
Tickets €6

A screening of a classic Hitchcock film which features in the visual arts exhibition Flicks. North by North West is featured in the work of Swedish artist, Tobias Anderson. One of a series in Sliced Classics, 879 is based upon 879 drawn still images from the Swedish translation of Alfred Hitchcock's classic. Originally made in a transparent black and white, he has also made a colour version of the same work. This work is exhibited in Highlanes Gallery.

Cary Grant plays a Manhattan advertising executive who is mistaken for a government agent. His attempts to clear up the misunderstanding only implicate him in a murder that makes him the target in a nationwide hunt. Forced on the run, he's faced at every turn by assassins out to kill him, and the mysterious Eva Marie Saint who's only too keen to help.  Running at over two hours, Hitchcock is able to pack in many memorable sequences including the famous crop-dusting scene. While each of them excels in intrigue and suspense, he cleverly links them with black humour. Hitch delivers these emotional highs and lows with perfect timing, allowing moments of relief to break out before mounting another crescendo of excitement. The effect is like a grand musical work, conducted with bravura audience manipulation.

Droichead Arts Centre

Suky Best and Rory Hamilton Rodeo - three screen installation 2008.
Suky Best and Rory Hamilton's collaborative practice has evolved out of a mutual interest in cowboy films and the lure of the American West. In three separate animated films, the Rodeo is reframed as a contemporary gladiatorial event.

Highlanes Gallery

Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg Revolution, 2008.

Tracey Moffatt’s photography, film and video works are concerned with power relations, hysteria, the media and forms of escape from stereotyped subjectivities. Recently she has directed a series of filmic montages edited in collaboration with Gary Hillberg. REVOLUTION is a study of the stereotypes associated with revolution in movies. Excerpts from well-known films are juxtaposed with clips from B movies in a dynamic and highly crafted composition accompanied by a rhythmic and melodramatic soundtrack.

Paul Pfeiffer Pure Products Go Crazy, 1998

Paul Pfeiffer's work transforms images and objects from televised sporting and media events, fashion photography, and Hollywood movies prompting us to reconsider conventional attitudes about issues of the body, race, identity, faith, and architectural space in contemporary society. In Pure Products Go Crazy, 1998, Tom Cruise, as Joel Goodson in Risky Business, is helplessly writhing on a couch, in a moment from the famous air guitar scene.

Christian Marclay Telephones, 1995.

Christian Marclay is best known for performances and recordings that transform existing musical recordings into new compositions, prefiguring within the avant-garde such movements as ‘turntablism.’ Marclay’s acclaimed video work Telephones, 1995, functions as a commentary on the nature and interrelationship of recorded sound and image.

Bea McMahon States of Wonder, 2006-08

Bea McMahon mostly uses video and small drawings to articulate her ideas which weave a strange and boundless path between an inner reality of thought and the ordinary outside world, a world in which her version of events have a somewhat hallucinogenic feel. In her work States of Wonder, the 1970s TV dramatisation of Wonderwoman, starring Lynda Carter, is the realisation of an imaginary phenomenon that more or less corresponds to the Quantum mechanical properties of light (a photon’s spin to be precise).

Nicolas Jasmin *O…!+’(Patrick),1999, 50 seconds

Nicolas Jasmin uses found footage from films to deconstruct narratives, create new meanings and to crack up a heightened focus. In '*O…!+’(Patrick), a video work sampled, in classic scratch video style, from an Alain Corneau film, Serie Noire, features the actor Patrick Dewaere.

Martin Healy Little Devils, three-screen installation, 2002

Martin Healy’s work explores the aesthetics and mediation of popular cultural mythologies and phenomena. Little Devils, consists of three short extracts edited from films that featured, as a common characteristic, a young male central character, with (reputedly) supernatural powers.

Tobias Anderson, Chase, 2005: Sliced Classics, 2002: 879, 1998: 879, 2002

Tobias Anderson uses found footage and animation that references film history and film classics, particularly Hitchcock, action and thriller sequences of escape and chase. 879 is based upon 879 drawn still images from the Swedish translation of Alfred Hitchcock's classic North by Northwest. In Sliced Classics the very edges of eight classic Hollywood movies form the basis of a new work which becomes almost entirely abstract. In Chase, the animated setting in San Francisco excludes essential items from the famous high speed car chase of Bullitt from 1968.

Tobias Anderson is supported by the
International Artists Studio Program in Sweden

The Railway Station

Jennifer Brady, We’ve Still Got a Few Minutes, site-specific sound installation, 2007.

Jennifer Brady uses sound and sculptural installation, often in a site specific context. We’ve Still Got a Few Minutes is a sampled audio from David Lean's “Brief Encounter” (1945) in which the two main protagonists have their last scene together before they end their relationship.

Flicks – the cinematic in art is curated by Cliodhna Shaffrey in close collaboration with Drogheda Arts Festival Committee.

Opening Hours

Opening Hours
Highlanes Gallery, Laurence Street
Wed 29 April – Sun 21 June
Mon – Sat: 10am - 6pm
Sun & Bank Holidays: 12pm - 5pm
Admission: Free

Droichead Arts Centre, Stockwell Street
Wed 29 April – Sat 30 May
Tues – Sat: 10am – 6pm
Admission: Free

Note: an exhibition guide will accompany this exhibition and will be available at both Highlanes Gallery and Droichead Arts Centre