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Red Lines
Alan Phelan
Joly Screen Photographs
Alan Phelan has been working for the past three years on reviving the Joly Screen process, a forgotten colour photography process invented in the 1890s in Dublin by John Joly, a physicist and geology professor from Trinity College, Dublin.
This exhibition marks the first major exhibition of this new body of work. The photographs are small 4x5 sheet film sized images as they comprise of two parts - the sheet film from a large format camera and a colour screen sheet. The Joly process is not a chemical process but instead filters light on exposure and display to create colour. The screen is made up of red, green and blue stripes, giving the photographs a very distinct appearance. Phelan also engages installation devices on walls and windows to reference the process as well as narratives from a wider art history. The small images have the intensity of painted miniatures, illuminated by LED panels, slowing down the viewing of a photograph as well as allowing for a unique colour shift that happens on display.
The images selected for Red Lines have nostalgic feel given muted colours and the content which reference historic flower paintings made in collaboration with members of the Dunboyne Flower and Garden Club. For Phelan this is an opportunity to expand his interest in participatory practices, art making that involves working with others to expand the notion of authorship into a shared activity, one that remains unfixed and creating agency as well as new knowledge in the process.
Further notes:
Red Lines are all too familiar in political parlance right now. They mean everything and nothing, intractable demands that must shift but cannot shift, but then do. History is filled with similar moments, and with this exhibition the origins of photography and conceptual art are called out, asking questions about fundamentals and apparent universals. Leading on from Phelan’s counterfactual approaches in Irish revolutionary history, this exhibition presents a body of work that creates a new perspective on the photography, based on forgotten methodologies to make an alternate history.
On entry to the former court house building where The Dock is located, the staircase and mezzanine are fitted with red strips. These mark a line between decorative intervention and conceptual conceit – playing off the infamous stripes of Daniel Buren, who was both ridiculed and celebrated for his ambition to render art mechanically systematic yet perceptually site sensitive. Ultimately his work was embraced by the museum it sought to smash yet embedded in much art history as it is impossible to think of stripes with him.
The lines also refer the photographic process revived by Phelan over the past three years. In this first large showing of contemporary Joly Screen Photographs, Phelan presents a historical overview of floral art, giving this unique colour process a history it never had, having been abandoned from use over 100 years ago.
Since the Joly Screen Process has been forgotten, reviving it creates a new history, one that also shifts the origins of photography itself into a different timeline. Located instead in the socio-economic framework of imperialism, the Joly Screen photographs in the show reference the writings of photography theorist Ariella Azoulay, presenting a photography that originates in the 1490s, displacing it from the technology of the 1830s connecting to a different “imperial temporality”.
The images in Red Lines are based around the history of flower painting and flower arranging. Work titles name the source artist, year of their activity and a related historical event. The works do not seek to perfectly re-create or re-appropriate but construct a flawed approximate, out-of-sync and yet connected to a related flow of events. For example, it should be impossible to look at the Dutch Golden Age flower paintings without acknowledging the Tulip Mania that swept the financial markets, laying the foundations for the boom/bust economic cycle. Indeed the cultivation of flowers mirror the rise of the bourgeoisie in early Western imperial and colonial travels and land grabs, charting not so innocent trades routes, that are now the subject of much discussion and revision in decolonising Western art traditions. In a sequence of three images based on paintings from the early 1700’s, exotic flowers are made-up from domestic gardens and German supermarkets, assembled to resemble abundant Baroque designs, exotic Spring bulbs and unconsolidated debt. The references are subtle but the direction of interpretation is away from mere aesthertics.
The photorealism of much flower painting belies the mixed-seasons of specimens on show and oddly negates the creativity required by the artists in assembling these painted arrangements. Similarly the history of floral art is often dismissed as craft. The thematic categories in contemporary flower arranging competitions however, require imaginative and conceptual leaps that are not dissimilar from art yet function and operate in parallel worlds. Working with members of Dunboyne Flower and Garden Club over the past 9 months, Phelan has held monthly workshops where arrangements were created and photographed. Seasons, art eras and floral art ground breakers like Constance Spry were used to make this history for the Joly Screen spanning 500 years.
Red Lines begins a history that was forgotten, re-drafting a timeline for photography that enables it to speak about a wide range of topics. This is the first exhibition of five upcoming shows into 2020 that will re-align photography to different histories and timelines, not to re-enact but create something that should potentially exist.
Alan Phelan and Dunboyne Flower and Garden Club were recipients of Meath County Council Cultural Services Creative Award 2019. This award is supported by the Meath County Council Creative Ireland Programme.
Alan Phelan studied at DCU, Dublin and RIT, New York. NCAD School of Fine Art Artist in Residence for 2019-20. Recent projects include Our Kind, a work about Roger Casement, commissioned by Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane for 2016/1916. He has exhibited widely including IMMA Dublin, LCGA Limerick, Solstice Navan, Kunstmuseum Bonn, BOZAR Brussels, OK11 Helsinki, Eastlink Gallery Shanghai, Chapter Cardiff, SKUC Ljubljana, SKC Gallery Belgrade and The Whitney Museum of American Art New York
Exhibition continues until Saturday 4th January, 2020 www.thedock.ie
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