SENSATION

David Fagan
ADMISSION FREE
Coinciding with the exhibition A MacGuffin and Some Other Things, Project Arts Centre continues its new experimental Grotto series, with an installation by David Fagan entitled Sensation. Engaging with the idea of the cabinet as a less salubrious, low-rent space, Fagan re-imagines it as prime real estate for a ‘dirty work’ – an object that is aesthetically pleasing and display-ready, but that is also somewhat under-thought or conceptually slippery in its origin.Fagan has remodelled the Grotto as a camouflaged installation that requires viewers to peer through a small peephole. There one encounters an object on display – a prismatic, refracting glass statuette: sitting on top of a flatscreen monitor, the glass object catches light emitted from television broadcasts, and traps the light as an unidentifiable, abstracted colour spectrum. Although one’s first reaction to such an object is to recognise it for what it is and how you are viewing it, its more active role is in transforming a television emission into aesthetic colour spectrum. Thus we are teased, confronted and captivated in a quickly evolving series of reactions – reactively passing through different associations of ‘sensation’.Throughout the year, more emerging artists will be selected in relation to the gallery programme, and given carte blanche in how they conceptualise and re-invent the Grotto.
Biography
David Fagan (b. Dublin, Ireland, 1982) is interested in systems of organisation and communication. His work focuses on bureaucratic systems such as laws and protocols; and also on systems which can determine how information is disseminated, such as television and satellite communications. He is interested in the elements which constitute the ontological and bureaucratic infrastructure of a system. Working through sculpture, video and performance, he co-opts, mimics and reconfigures these elements to create works which play with relationships between individuals and the systems which control and inform them.
Recent exhibitions include NCAD Graduate Show, Dublin (2011); Sister Acts and The Third Man, Birswanger Contemporary, Schaffhausen, Switzerland (2010); 474m2, Dublin (2010); Ponton, Zhdk, Zurich, Switzerland (2010); and Remix, BL Museum, Basel, Switzerland (2010). Fagan is also curating an evening of performance works to mark the final moments of analogue satellite television in Europe, Prelude to Nothing will take place at The LAB, Dublin, in April 2012.