Deep In The Woods

TULCA: Within and without
Galway City, Ireland

10 – 14 November 2006
TULCA is a city-wide series of exhibitions across Galway, curated by Cliodhna Shaffrey, Sarah Season and Aine Philips.

Within the enormous basement space at Fairgeen, Galway, Mona Casey & Paul McAree have created an installation responding directly to the cavernous interior. Using metaphor humour and a large amount of cardboard, the installation is a kind of low-fi goth-horror kitsch creation, juxtaposing a canonical sense of art history with meaningless cultural derivatives. The work seeks to investigate some sense of cultural meaning and value in contemporary art, investigating the myth of the figure of the artist.

On entering the space. a life-size cardboard stag, lit from below and enshrouded in fog, looks across the vast basement. Beautifully crafted in layers aid strips of cardboard, this proud stag stands as metaphor for the natural world and as an oft-painted majestic subject in art.

Directly across from the stag hangs a light piece reading ‘screaming skulls of putrid ham’, immediately destroying any Romantic notions as to what this work may be about Crafted again in cardboard and punctuated by hundreds of white fairy lights, the large gothic letters suggest a modern ‘horror’ or nu-metal influence. The juxtaposition of light piece and stag serves to polarise both and underline some sense of absurdity in logical readings.

Three video works document the artists at work in the studio. Coffin, a two screen projection, shows the artists making a coffin out of plywood sheets. At the end of the piece Mona nails Paul into the coffin, and walks off-screen. On the opposite wall, Fog a single screen projection, documents the artists making fog in the studio. discussing the quality of fog and the fog machine. Directly referencing Nauman’s Mapping the Studio ll, these floor to ceiling projections use art historical and contemporary cultural references
to suggest that the artist is. literally or metaphorically. surrounded in fog.

One last video work. Sam is a cross between Munch’s The Scream and Hitchcock’s Psycho, featuring Mona in the studio, performing several takes of an agonising scream.