Ronan McCrea

Latent: Study for Decade-ism (early & late)

Dates, dated-ness and timeliness are reoccurring tropes as is a recursive turning over of long held materials.

Latent: Study for Decade-ism (early & late) is a suite of twenty five black & white photographs that constitute a re-consideration of the materiality of sculpture from 2003 entitled Decade-ism (early and late), where periods of time defined by decades: late fifties – early sixties;  late sixties – early seventies;  late seventies – early eighties; late eighties – early nineties  are rendered in glass neon tubing, but without illumination.

Twenty years later, the disassembled glass sculpture is in fragments and pieces, dusty and scratched, presenting now as a storage problem and a tricky photographic subject.  

Shot through a red filter onto large format black & white film, the resulting images are hand processed and printed by the artist the darkroom, transforming the object to something else, if not exactly something new. The photographs represent a transition from object to image, from then to now.

For a solo exhibition at Green on Red Gallery, Dublin in 2003, the photographs where installed throughout the space on steel shelves laid flat to the wall, held in place with magnets.