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23/3/2005

Cian Quayle

Dagmar De Pooter Gallery, Antwerp

Photographic Readymades and Other Found Objects

Photographic Readymades and Other Found Objects is Cian Quayle’s second exhibition at the Dagmar de Pooter Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1995 he exhibited Relocations at Dagmar de Pooter’s Langeleemstraat gallery. The title of this exhibition refers to Ed Ruscha’s commentary on his own seminal bookworks of the 1960’s. Each of his books featured a photographic series of gas stations, car parks, vacant lots, apartments and swimming pools, which traced the route between his former home in Oklahoma and his adopted home in Los Angeles. This was also of course a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s choice of banal yet unique objects of mass production and their presentation as artworks, the designation of which he described as follows.

Specification for ¨Readymades¨:
* By planning for a moment to come (on such a day, such a date such a minute), ¨to inscribe a readymade¨–The readymade can later be looked for.–(with all kinds of delays)
* The important thing then is just this matter of timing, this snapshot effect, like a speech delivered on no matter what occasion but at such and such an hour. It is a kind of rendezvous.
*Naturally inscribe that date, hour, minute, on the readymade as information.
*Also the serial characteristic of the readymade.

This exhibition reprises diverse strands of Quayle’s recent work, which are connected by his ongoing concern with travel, place and identity. The identity of Quayle’s artwork is also investigated in terms of its changed materiality as he travels from place to place. This exhibition introduces images and objects, as either artefact or document, exhibited together for the first time, which interweave anecdote and historical references, whilst distanced from the vernacular setting of their origin.

Following Quayle’s exhibition at the Dagmar de Pooter Gallery in 1995, he exhibited Eraser-Ed at the Beeld Fotografiecollectief in 1996. This installation was based on an ongoing archive of images, which have been collected as a part-homage to legendary Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx. The doubled-image of Merckx entitled Eddy-34 was originally exhibited in motor : show (2000), which was curated by Rob Flint and Lucy Renton, at Proof in London. Here Eddy-34 – avoir l’apprenti dans le soleil – (to have the apprentice in the sun) appropriates an inscription from a pen and ink drawing by Duchamp of 1914 showing a cyclist ascending a gradient, with his head bowed, drawn across a diagonal scale on a page of sheet-music paper. Merckx is shown during a 1968 edition of the Paris-Nice stage race, which is also known as the race to the sun. Three years earlier in 1965 Merckx rode to second place behind Jacques Anquetil in the professional road race on the Isle of Man.

Cian Quayle was born in 1966 in Douglas in the Isle of Man and is based in London where he has recently completed a practise-based PhD titled The Aesthetics of Distance. Although his background is rooted in painting, over the last ten years he has worked predominantly with photography as a medium on all levels. Inventory for a Reverse Journey is the title of an archive, of over three hundred images collected during the last twenty years, which contains family snapshots, photographic postcards, found photographs and his own photographs of Douglas at different points in time. This project culminated in Return Ticket (2003 - 2004), a yearlong installation of twenty photographic artworks along the boundary wall of the Derby Castle Depot in Douglas, measuring some one hundred metres in length. Sea-mine (2004) is a work drawn from this archive, which also utilises a lightbox in order to illuminate the porosity of the digitally modified image. The decommissioned sea-mine has already undergone transformation as it has been reclaimed as a seaside collection box for The Society for Shipwrecked Mariners. This work is offset by the analogue blur of another photograph from Quayle’s family snapshots. Chain-gang shows a group of cyclists stood outside the Nook café, a rendezvous point at the Quarter Bridge on the outskirts of Douglas. This group includes Quayle’s father and other members of the Manx Road Club, who had been in contact with Rik van Looy, another Belgian champion of the 1950’s. A Manx Road Club racing jersey commissioned from Unisport in Paris at that time is also installed as part of this exhibition. The transformation of these images alludes to the elision of both figure and ground, which here become one and the same. Movement and transparency were also at issue in Duchamp’s drawing of the ascending cyclist, descending Nudes and The Large Glass, as well as his interest in photography.

A third lightbox work, entitled Wild Boar (Gasthof Koreth), is drawn from a series of images Postcards from Innsbruck - Journeys to Euroland. A series of images, which documented Quayle’s navigation by bicycle of the city landscape and rural environs of Innsbruck in preparation for the exhibition Techniken des Vorüberziehens (Techniques of Transition) curated by Verena Gfader in 2002. This image echoes Quayle’s preoccupation with the horizon-line as a delay, threshold and limit of balance manifest in the distorted interior space of the hotel reception area. The same year he exhibited Mnemonic Surfaces in Digital Responses, curated by Paul Coldwell and Barbara Rauch at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2004 he exhibited in Mothers curated by Harry Pye and First Assembly curated by Mat Humphrey both also in London. More info on the artist, please contact the gallery: info@dagmardepootergallery.com

This exhibition is supported by the British Council.

Image: 'Chain-gang' " Photographic Readymades and Other Found Objects"

Preview: 24 March 2005, 6 - 9 pm

Dagmar De Pooter Gallery
Graaf Van Hoornestraat 6 - Antwerp

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