Art
Flashback exhibition comes to Hunt Museum from May 16 to June 30
Gerry Burke and Gillian Kenny Shinnors pictured outside the Hunt Museum, their exhibition Flashback comes to the museum from May 16 to June 30
Flashback, an exhibition of the work of Gillian Kenny Shinnors and Gerry Burke launches on Thursday, May 16 at the Hunt Museum café space running up to June 30
The exhibition, displaying the work of Gillian Kenny Shinnors and Gerry Burke will launch at 5:30 pm in the Hunt Museum’s café space and will show a common ground between the artists.
The slow, imprecise nature of oil painting results mostly in images that are detached from the present time. Furthermore, because of limited resolution, the images are also inexact records of reality. They are like flashbacks: interjected scenes that take the narrative back in time from the current point in the story.
They are the back catalogues of a life, ideas and memories made tangible. In this age of artificial intelligence and instant digital reproducibility, works in paint have priorities other than information content: they can offer a different reading of the source material and can find very different essences in it.
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There is much common ground between these two artists: they are ‘exporters’ of electronic imagery from the current plethora into that old, slow, painstaking medium of oil painting.
Imagery is appropriated from family photos, film and concert footage, social and mainstream media. The resultant harvest forms their visual research and archive. In turn, the material is filtered through each artist’s individual lens: cropped, manipulated, saturated, selected or rejected, printed, archived.
No previous generation of artists has been assailed with such copious imagery and this is especially true since the advent of the smartphone and image-sharing social media platforms.
As sifters of imagery, both artists are interested in why certain images, out of the profusion, are finally selected for painting. The artistic process involves an iterative and empathic response, elevating the seemingly most banal of imagery through the touch of brush and hand.
Born in Limerick, Gillian Kenny Shinnors studied painting at the Limerick School of Art and Design, graduating with a first-class honours degree and then completed her MFA at the University of Ulster, Belfast. She was awarded the Countess Markievich medal for painting by the United Arts Club Dublin during her student days.
Growing up in Dublin, Gerry Burke also has roots in the Joyce Country Gaeltacht of north Connemara and has been working as a consultant in the Maternity Hospital Limerick for 25 years. As a teenager, he was a pupil of the academic portrait painter, George Collie, RHA, who encouraged him to become a painter, which he actively considered. In the end, however, he studied medicine and painted only intermittently thereafter.
Launching Thursday 16th of May 5.30 to 7 at the Hunt Museum (Café Space), Flashback continues until June 30th.
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