Heavier than a coffin on your shoulder
The Agency, London
19 Jan – 23 Feb 2008
The Agency is pleased to present a new collaborative installation and series of works by Irish artist duo Casey & McAree.
Casey & McAree’s work rises from post-punk inspirations as well as references to the Irish troubled historical and cultural legacy. The work is highly theatrical, the installation functions akin to a mise-en-scene both as a complete vision as well as paying credence to the making-of. For Mona Casey and Paul McAree the collaborative/ performative process of making work is as important as the final piece itself.
Hence the exhibition begins with a video diptych documenting a performance, continues with a light-piece spelling Screaming Skulls Putrid Hatred and culminates in a large sculptural installation. The sculpture rises from a path of latex skulls and reveals an apocalyptic rider on a stag, and is complete with a multi-speaker, rumbling drone-work created by McAree. Made from cardboard remnants the life-size stag is both regal and dilapidated. The faceless rider wears a dunce or Capirote, a conical hat, which during the Spanish Inquisition was given to heretics to wear in order to ridicule them but later took on another dark meaning with its association with the Ku Klux Klan. The Stag also has iconographic meanings, both within Celtic mythology and later as part of Christian iconography. St Eustace saw a stag with a cross appearing between his antlers. This inspired his conversion to Christianity and subsequent persecution and death. The artists play with poignant iconography, religious and historic connotations, albeit transposed into a diasporic world where materials are not precious, yet thoughts and cultural ciphers inherently remain powerful.
Casey & McAree are evoking a world of dubious morals, danger and death in a gothic manner, which becomes a stage set for the world’s malaise recounted with images. The dark iconographic connotations also echo more recent transgressions against humanity in Iraq. Casey & McAree’s Irish sensibility translates this in a poignant manner of remembering continuous resistance to the eradication of indigenous cultural values. The work comments on global identities being forged through localized wars and rapid re-alignment of cultures through external influences and conflict. Playing on multiple meanings their works become universal. In parallel their sub-cultural references to graffiti and music as well as the poverty of materials used speak of the transformation of iconography into a contemporary unstable environment.
Whilst both artists pursue their independent practice, Paul McAree as a painter and Mona Casey as a multimedia artist, they come together regularly to create a folk-like rendition of their common cultural references. Casey & McAree’s common practice comes across like a powerful exorcism. Together they find the strength to dispel popular myths, disseminate inciting truths and find a new language of visual expression, which conveys these concerns with a rigorous and yet poetic conceptual language.
Paul McAree and Mona Casey have made collaborative works since 2001. In 2005 they founded Colony, an artist run space in Birmingham, where they have shown alongside a host of invited artists.
