Reality Show, at Siamsa Tíre Theatre and Arts Centre, Tralee

Oliver Comerford, Diana Copperwhite, Margaret Corcoran, Gary Coyle, Bongi MacDermott, Geraldine O’Neill, David Quinn, Dermot Seymour - selected by Gemma Tipton

03/03/2006 - 07/04/2006

“If you could see what I have seen with your eyes…” This line comes from the movie Blade Runner. Rutger Hauer’s ‘replicant’ has gone in search of the people who created him. Now in the icy studio of an eye-maker, he is looking for answers. But what could the eye-maker know, even if he did make the eyes that did the looking? Working out reality is something of a problem, in life as well as at the movies. It is not what you see with your eyes that gives you the sensation of something, but how your history, experience and emotions process what you are looking at. There is a bit of philosophy, biology and neurochemistry in there too, to complicate things. So how can we know what someone else is seeing? Even when we are standing right beside them?

And yet we persist in our definitions, determined to impart our sense (and sensation) of place, person, thing. Keen to establish a conclusive, concrete reality, we report, write, talk, document, describe, photograph; we create interpretive centres. We also make art. It is this that draws together the eight artists in this exhibition, selected from the group working with the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin. From the real to the hyperreal, and through painting, drawing, photography and film, the works create not only images of places and things, but wrap around the sensations and sense of experience, the meanings that give us the closest thing to an empathy with someone we may never meet, a genuine communication of a place and point in time.

What links these individual artists is a body of work that is not a representation pretending to be real, or one determined to be ‘better than the real’, but one offering a shared reality, literally presenting a sense of “this is what I have seen with my eyes…”
Gemma Tipton, 2006

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