Abstract
Invited national and international artists exhibited in a range of locations around the city of Kilkenny. Dougal McKenzie’s paintings and works on paper were selected for show in Butler House, with a particular view to the compositional formats of the works responding to the historical and architectural elements of the venue. The themes within the work investigated how painting as a medium might revisit and review the history and narratives of particular events, in this case using imagery from holiday slides taken by McKenzie’s maternal grandfather on trips to the USSR and Romania in the early 1970s. Sections of the original slides were cropped into circular compositions, which in turn were placed within larger square formats. Some other smaller paintings were made within purely circular formats. As with history, this reformatting and cropping of imagery inevitably left some things out, focusing on only part of the image and its story. The original slide images might be regarded as simple holiday snapshots. However, taken as they were by McKenzie’s grandfather who had been a keen amateur photographer belonging to the Edinburgh Leith Dock’s Camera Club, they might also be regarded as pictures that operate both as family mementos and as historical documents of life in the former Eastern Bloc. The paintings stemming from this source material are typical of McKenzie’s ongoing research into the idea of new approaches to history painting, and also painting’s relationship to the photographic image. This exhibition of work was viewed by a wide audience local to Kilkenny, and also by international visitors to the Festival. Curated by Hugh Mulholland.
Original language | English |
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Size | 10 |
Publication status | Published (in print/issue) - 8 Aug 2008 |
Event | Visual Art at Kilkenny Arts Festival 2008 - Butler House / Kilkenny Duration: 8 Aug 2008 → 17 Aug 2008 |