THIS WAY TO
ENCHANTMENT
Rory Tangney – Sirius
Arts Centre, Cobh, Co. Cork
19 October – 16
November 2014
I remember my father playing some
recordings from my childhood. The sounds
were those of footsteps in the stone yard outside and baby voices asking
questions that I don’t remember now. The
recordings were on reel to reel tape and we listened to them again and again by
pushing a lever on the tape recorder to the left or right to play and rewind.
The memory of listening to those recordings hits me when I see Consensus, a two-part
sculptural work in the second solo show by Rory Tangney at the Sirius Arts
Centre. Metres of reel to reel audio
tape are suspended in a geometric wooden framework. The tape is in colours of rust, dark brown
and grey and moves slightly with the air movement of the viewer’s passing. In places it is kinked and creased and one
piece is repaired with sellotape. These
frail audio slices of lives lived and recorded are preserved in part in the
sound piece When All Is Said And Done.
Here are more slices and fragments, primarily the voice of Peter Higgs,
who predicted the existence of the Higgs boson or ‘God particle’, together with
explosions, clicks and warbles, male voices and a musical track interwoven
throughout. Some of the sounds are
recordings are taken from inside an MRI scanner and Tangney has referenced this
in three fragile pencil drawings, What If, Know Thyself and Slice. Intimate and delicate, Know Thyself and Slice
allow us inside Tangney’s head, literally, since they are drawn directly from images
produced from an MRI scan that Tangney had several years ago. They suggest human vulnerability against
scientific invincibility but also draw attention to the very site of artistic
creation itself, something beyond the horizon of consciousness and in direct
conflict with the will-to-technology of the 21st century. The drawings are made up thousands of pencil
dots, appearing hazy and faint in contrast both to the science which they refer
back to and also to the sculptural works in the show. Yet even these sculptural works, Consensus
and Monument, for all their sharp solidity, are sliced, layered and segmented. This layering of sound, vision, idea and
object is replicated throughout this show.
These works are carefully chosen and executed so that they resonate with
meaning both individually and collectively, presenting a series of visual and
aural prompts rotating around questions of science and religion in a
post-religious world.
These questions follow on from Tangney’s
first solo show, Build Your Church On The Strength Of Your Fear which was held in
2011 at The Camden Palace Hotel in Cork
Tangney’s father was a physician and his childhood was paradoxically
spent in a staunch Catholic background combined with a rigid adherence to
scientific rationalism. Tangney investigates
and attempts to reconcile this dichotomy through his art practice as a
spiritual outlet into which he brings a concern both for the nature of belief
and conviction on the one hand and on the other, a fascination with science and
its possibilities.
A second sound piece, Breathe,
consists of rhythmic, pulsing exhalations of sound which come in regulated
slices. It could be a machine breathing or a machine sustaining human
life. One is reminded of an iron lung in which polio
patients lay until they could breathe again unaided but the sound becomes
comforting after a while, its mechanical regularity both proof and reassurance
of a firm existence, here and now, enduring perpetually. At the
other end of this spectrum is Paranormal, a pencil drawing which looks like an
old, grainy black and white photograph of a UFO. Tangney’s interest in obsolete technologies
is obvious but he uses these references and materials to raise doubts for the
technologies we live with today. The drawing Lifeline is an extreme close up of
the palm of a hand, simultaneously a reminder of the limitations of science and
an invocation of beliefs outside of science.
Finally, if we cannot trust science
and we cannot turn to religion, what is left?
The works always return to one starting point, which is the self; fragile,
finite, sometimes reliant on science for life itself. Science may refute the
spirit but in This Way To Enchantment Tangney insists again and again on the
interconnectedness of ourselves, (even as particles and fragments), with both.
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| Consensus |
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| Paranormal |
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| Know Thyself |
I could go on, in fact I should probably start a new blog just for Ballydowane. This series is called Detritus - I love the contrast between the image suggested by the name and the image itself and yet, this is what it is.
