Ronan McCrea

35mm slide projection installation Ronan McCrea’s new work, New Town Centre Project (Extract #1) has been developed in response to the very particular geography of the Blanchardstown. It is on show at Draiocht Arts Centre Blanchardstown untill 4 April 2009. The result is an immersive installation of photographic slide projections and soundtrack that work explores the subject as both an enigma and an emblematic form: a form over determined by significant social and political forces of recent Irish just-past.

images:
(click on image to enlarge)

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “Arcade Project” this new work, New Town Centre Project (Extract #1) presents a rich associative montage of sources and images. Projected photographic images interweave with the voice of a female narrator, played by Yemi Adenuga, who tells of an unspecified protagonist’s tangential thoughts, reports, anecdotes and quotes.

A confluence of ideas are touched upon, including: retail theory and practice; early photography and the capture of movement; the privatisation of public space; tartan motifs in architecture and photography; urban planning; political corruption; Victor Gruen; interiors and exteriors; crime; street photography; model making and the meaning of ruins.

As part of the project artist Joe Coveney was invited to conduct drawing and sculpture workshop with 4th class pupils of Scoil Oilibheir, Coolmine using the Blanchardstown Centre as a subject. The alternate ways of producing knowledge of a place were explored in the workshops and some images of this work are integrated into the installation.

The artist has also made an architectural intervention in the form of a temporary wall in the gallery which serves to create a darkened space for projected images, the reverse of which, is visible from the windows outside the gallery. This intervention resonates with the introverted architectural form of shopping centres and plays off the themes of “interiority” present in the artwork.