Dublin

During the winter holidays a friend and I found cheap return flights to Dublin so decided to go to explore Irish culture and see Ireland around Christmas. Despite not being the most aesthetically pleasing city, I wanted to explore and see what kind of interesting photographs I could capture on my film camera. Looking at tone, textures and form I wanted to capture the non-conventional responses to our couple of days in Dublin. 

We visited the IMMA (Irish Museam of Modern Art) which was a really peaceful get away from the bar areas. Amongst their impressive permanent collections, they were exhibiting Rodney Graham's 'That's not me' series. Graham is a painter, photographer, writer, philosopher, actor, psychologist, scientist, and musician and I have followed his work since touching on him in a A Level project. His work is of impressive scale and detail, as he immerses himself in new worlds and character construction in a realistic yet parody manner. His vast talents transpire in the reception of the images, which seem to involve a lot of thought.

'This new monograph gathers together works made between 1994 and 2017, in particular his photographic lightboxes and his musical production. Contradicting the title “That’s Not Me,” the lightbox series focuses on the use of the self-portrait. Graham shows himself starring in various fictional roles (artist, musician, actor, lighthouse keeper, paddler, reader) at different times. According to curator Alessandro Vincentelli, Graham likes to look back at history and repeat it through his work, by “stirring up art history with multiple and varied cultural references, so that the signals are subtly altered for the viewer.” Briony Fer suggests that, “as much as Graham makes pictures that cohere as mise-en-scènes, and that operate self-reflexively to speculate on the very mechanics of the image, so it is impossible to keep all the allusions in check. There is something enigmatic that we can never entirely satisfactorily trace back to the numerous sources that may or may not be at stake. The more Graham elaborates the plotlines for his pictures, the more insistent the sense that there is something moot or irreducible at work in the image. Every hypothetical injunction to ‘suppose’ tends to lead to another possible conjecture.” Through his visual production, Rodney Graham questions the fundamental perception of the image and invites the public to participate in shaping its meaning.' - jrp ringier 

 

We also visited Dublin Castle where we learned about fashions and of the 1900s and the politics of Ireland.I have always made a point of finding out the politics of a country I visit as to understand their culture and city, rather than using it as simply a holiday destination. 

At the Chester Beatty Library we saw The Sacred Traditions Gallery which exhibits the sacred texts, illuminated manuscripts and miniature paintings from the great religions and systems of belief represented in the collections - Christianity, Islam and Buddhism with smaller displays on Confucianism, Daoism, Sikhism and Jainism. This incredible historic exhibition presents well the aesthetic similarities and differences between global cultures and religions, such as between India, China, Japan and Turkey.