In Fashion, at Limerick City Gallery of Art

Mark O'Kelly

15/01/2005 - 27/02/2005

‘.. in order to rediscover time and it’s drama , we must abandon the rhetoric of the signified and move on to the rhetoric of the Fashion sign.’
– Roland Barthes, Système de la mode (1967, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard, 1983)

In Fashion by Mark O’Kelly comprises thirty-five works in oil on linen, including six new paintings, charting a progression of style from the purely abstract to his very latest representational and figurative work. Recurrent themes of travel, distance and geography are executed through architecture, landscape, portraiture and still life. All the work demonstrates a concentration on structure; as Yvonne Scott says, it is ‘founded on the abstract qualities of form, space and motifs of the built environment’. Using translated and appropriated imagery, a mirror universe of scenes that nearly took place is created. O’Kelly’s work offers seemingly familiar and recognisable subject
matter, through viewpoints that reference voyeurism and spectatorship.

O’Kellys latest work includes two landscapes, Johannesburgand Bawa’s Kandalama Hotel, and four fashion portraits. Referencing Roland Barthes writings on sign systems (fashion, photography etc.) and their relationship to language, this work explores new ground in its overt concentration on the oeuvre of the Fashion world. The exhibition will include a site specific collaboration with Sarah Pierce accumulating elements of the artists written
and source archive. Mark O’Kelly’s work depicts almost real times, places and events executed in
a formal, geometric and precise manner. Through a work practice which includes image research, collection and collation O’Kelly takes mediated
signifiers - images already culturally assimilated through photography, print and publication - and creates painted signifiers, fabricating original myths
through inflexion in painting; their signs become transformed through context.

Brought together for the first time in LCGA, this ensemble of work offers a near complete picture of Mark O’Kelly’s keyhole universe.

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