"Cian Quayle: Photographic Readymades and Other Found Objects"
2005-03-25 until 2005-04-30
Dagmar de Pooter Gallery
Antwerp, , BE Belgium

Photographic Readymades and Other Found Objects is Cian Quayle's second exhibition at the Dagmar de Pooter Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1995 he exhibited Relocations at Dagmar de Pooter's Langeleemstraat gallery. The title of this exhibition refers to Ed Ruscha‚s commentary on his own seminal photographic bookworks of the 1960's, which was also, a reference to Marcel Duchamp‚s choice of banal yet unique objects of mass production and their presentation as artworks.

This exhibition reprises diverse strands of Quayle‚s recent work, which are connected by his ongoing concern with travel, place and identity. The identity of Quayle's artwork is also investigated in terms of its changed materiality as he travels from place to place. This exhibition introduces images and objects exhibited together for the first time, which interweave anecdote and historical references, whilst distanced from the vernacular setting of their origin.

Following Quayle‚s exhibition at the Dagmar de Pooter Gallery in 1995, he exhibited Eraser-Ed at the Beeld Fotografiecollectief in 1996. This installation was based on an ongoing archive of images, which have been collected as a part-homage to legendary Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx. A doubled image of Merckx entitled Eddy-34 was originally exhibited in motor: show (2000), which was curated by Rob Flint and Lucy Renton, at Proof in London.

Cian Quayle was born in 1966 in Douglas in the Isle of Man and is based in London where he has recently completed a practice-based PhD titled The Aesthetics of Distance. Although his background is rooted in painting, over the last ten years he has worked predominantly with photography as a medium on all levels. Inventory for a Reverse Journey is the title of an archive, of over three hundred images collected during the last twenty years, which contains family snapshots, photographic postcards, found photographs and his own photographs of Douglas, at different points in time. This project culminated in Return Ticket (2003 - 2004), a yearlong installation of twenty photographic artworks along the boundary wall of the Derby Castle Depot in Douglas, measuring some one hundred metres in length. Sea-mine (2004) is a work drawn from this archive, which also utilizes a lightbox in order to illuminate the porosity of the digitally modified image.

A third lightbox work, entitled Wild Boar (Gasthof Koreth), is drawn from a series of images entitled Postcards from Innsbruck - Journeys to Euroland, which documented Quayle‚s navigation by bicycle of the city landscape and rural environs of Innsbruck for the exhibition Techniken des Vorüberziehens (Techniques of Transition) curated by Verena Gfader in 2002. The same year he exhibited Mnemonic Surfaces in Digital Responses, curators Paul Coldwell and Barbara Rauch at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Dagmar de Pooter Gallery promotes their artists with an absolutearts.com Gallery Portfolio. View more work from the Gallery at: http://galleries.absolutearts.com/ddepooter/.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Belgium

Other Important Exhibitions in Belgium