“AS FAR AS is Anne Tallentire’s second solo exhibition at the gallery and will include works spanning from 1989 to the present day. This exhibition welcomes Anne Tallentire to the gallery program.
In the 1980s Tallentire made a series of works centering around experiences of dislocation, posing questions around who speaks and what is the nature of this speaking. At this time Tallentire often worked with performance strategies, developed not only through installation but also by the use of the camera – as an instigator of activity and also a recorder of a partial view; bringing the idea of the fragmented subject position to the fore.
At the core of Tallentire’s work is a refusal to harness easily available visual language, instead in works such as the film The Gap of Two Birds (1989), the identification of the subject’s position in relation to the object (in this case Maumeen Pass, Connemara) remains obscured. As Jean Fisher has remarked “The title also announces a ‘gap’ in language: a semantic conundrum which may be poetic, a fragment of a song, a non-sense even…but which, in a stuttering and delirious lapse, a ‘gap of two birds’ may slip into a ‘a gap of two words’.
Typical of Tallentire’s work is also an unwillingness to hold on to a finished form, works are re-presented and recycled – elements and fragments come in and out of view. From Instances (1999), initially a three part work consisting of a video projection, a video/performance cycle shot with a hand held camera and a video loop of a single image – performance action is presented here. The artist is brought into the frame, her body evidenced, listening – a sensory evocation is produced. The production of this counter sensorium to the visual provides us with an inverse of how and what we witness and how testimony may or may not find form.
From, in and with (2015) is a series of photographs displaying a selection of objects, such as tape, a ruler etc. The arranged objects act as a form of translation and plan making aiming to provoke reflection on Dublin’s built environment and the role of women architects in it.
Alongside previous works from 1989 to now, two new sculptural pieces will be realised in the gallery, responding to the architectural specificities of the space. Subtle elements will be inserted that bring into play possible propositions inspired by contemporary building materials and construction methods, encountered and recorded in city life in London and New York. A new video work provides an all too familiar view of the fast fix building pandemic changing city life. Captured and framed the building site is temporarily dislocated, the material-ness of the fabric of construction left hovering until a bus or other marker of life and scale snaps it back into its frame of reference.
The bringing of material in and out of view, found, harnessed and pulled into Tallentire’s lexicon is a trope found across her practice; the material world as witness to change, upheaval or stasis. In her own words Tallentire has described an impulse of being drawn to certain objects and not others. Interested in the plain and the ordinary, dismissed or overlooked she finds potential in objects destined for a different purpose. Anne Tallentire’s practice defies easy categorisation, making claim instead to a nimble dexterity in form, medium, and ideas; for hers is a practice constantly on the move.
