Ronan McCrea

In the film work Autodidact a series of vignettes portray a child ‘interacting’ with a university campus: variously observing, playing, running, climbing, sitting and occupied by moments of reverie. The protagonist is located amidst A&D Wejchert’s iconic post-68 ‘brutalist’ architecture of University College Dublin Belfield campus, which itself struggles to maintain coherent identity in the face of constant change and re-development, just as the child protagonist struggles to find and maintain her role as cinematic subject. The LCD screen displaying the black & white film is mounted on a tubular steel structure: a hybrid form between playground apparatus and abstract sculpture influenced recalling legacy of post war playground designer Aldo van Eyck. (Interestingly in relation to the School Play photographs, van Eyck was famous for the birds eye view photographs he produced of his utopian inspired playground designs.) Both the highly symbolic social spaces of educational institutions and the trope of ‘play’ can be seen as sites of contested signification, social and ideological anxiety, instrumentalisation and ever increasing commodification.

Autodidact is presented as part of the solo exhibition AUTODIDACT at Green on Red Gallery, Dublin 14 April – 14 May 2011. This exhibition combines photographs from his recent School Play project with new works that further elaborate the theme of play and educational institutions in relation to the photographic and cinematic image, subjectivity, and artists ongoing interest in the form and function of highly symbolic social spaces.

School Play was a public art commission for School in Dublin 15 completed in 2009. For this work McCrea made a permanent architectural intervention in the form of a painted set of circles and arcs on the school yard for the (unspecified) use of children at play. This design also then functioned as a kind of ‘set’ for a series of photographs shot from an elevated position of children at play during break-times. These images reframed the children’s exuberant movements and interactions as a kind of collective choreography and in their composition recall the angles and framing of Rodchencko’s photography of the early Twentieth Century. A set of these photographs is now permanently installed in the Castleknock Educate Together School building. for further details click here

Below are some film stills from Autodidact