Requisite Distance: Solo Exhibition

Exhibition at Dallas Museum of Art which brought together "Ghost Story" - a fifteen-minute media work based on landscape and memory and a selection of eleven powerful photographs of the Irish and Northern Irish landscape from the 1990s.

Willie Doherty's interest in the Irish ghost story, as well as being born and raised in Northern Ireland during the time of the Troubles, informs the background for his video installation in this exhibition. "Ghost Story" powerfully evokes a mind at work trying to recall unsettling things, and the impact troubling memories have on the present day. Through a mesmerizing series of vivid imagery - including a lonely forest path with an ever-receding vanishing point, a darkened city underpass with a mysterious figure, and a pair of eyes perhaps looking to the past or the future - Doherty has created a masterful cinematic tale of quiet suspense whose evocative text (written by Doherty himself) is narrated by the renowned Irish actor Stephen Rea.

The video is paired with eleven large-scale color photographs from the 1990s that depict the famed Irish landscape as a site of barriers and roadblocks set amidst lyrical beauty. Created well before "Ghost Story," Doherty's photographs from the 1990s act as precursors and complements to the video work and provide further evidence of the sense of quiet unease unique to his art. Together, these works offer a compelling comparison between how our vision and thought process still and moving images, and will provide an intensely absorbing experience of an undeniably beautiful yet still little understood landscape.