Pictured at the official opening of ‘An Anthology of Others’ at Garter Lane Arts Centre a solo show of video works and video installations by Michael Fortune. Included in photograph Maeve Connolly (writer and lecturer who officially opened the exhibition in conversatiaon with Michael Fortune. |Photo: Leo Murphy
The Wexford writer, video and photography artist, Michael Fortune, has an excellent video show at Garter Lane Arts Centre. An Anthology Of Others is a wonderfully understandable set of video installations that create modern views of art as more than paintings on a gallery wall. The choice of work is from the ordinary, the quotidian, the found art of everyday living and you could spend a pleasant hour enjoying the work on different sizes of screens and a large projection onto a white wall.
In the front space up the steps there are six portable videos set in a circle and you can sit on a homely white ottoman, don the headphones and enjoy a fine slice of housewives’ tales, myths and folk legends of hares, fairies, death, scares and tall talery and shamroguery. But this is a vanishing Ireland and I loved the homely experience.
A real oddity is like a still photo of cars at a drive-in Bingo session as the twilight falls. It is only when you put on the headphones and hear the bingo caller.
The wall projection – Battle Of Duncannon – initially looks like a landscape, until a re-enacted battle starts at the back of the setting. The image wasn’t all that sharp but it has a fuzzy happy quality.
Work on show here is fast fading from life and is already moving into modern social or folktale and this is a good take on the use of video as art and an extension of gallery use as well.
Exhibition runs until 25th October.
