Billy Dante
'BETWEEN SEEING AND BLINDNESS'
TACTIC, Sample-Studios, Former Government Building, Sullivans Quay, Cork.
18/06/15 - 02/07/15
Curated by Billy Dante
Participating Artists:
Billy Dante, Richard Proffitt, Billy Childish, Terence Birch, Kevin O’Shea, Helen Horgan, Colm O’Brien, Femke Vandenberg, David Mathúna, Bren Smyth, Mark Buckeridge, Mariah Black, John Dwyer, Joseph Keating, Lewis Kenny, Seamus Barra Ó Súilleabháin, Cathal Holden, Alicia Byrne Keane, Paul Casey, Victoria Kennefick & Orla Travers
'Between Seeing and Blindness' was an exhibition that brought together the work of poets and visual artists.
The exhibitions title was derived from a quote by Peggy Phelan, made when she was describing Samuel Beckett’s fascination with art, ‘Beckett dramatised the rhythm of looking. This rhythm.....oscillates between seeing and blindness, between figuration and abstraction, between the void at the centre of sight and the contour of the slender ridge that brooks it’. This was something that Beckett was also preoccupied with in his plays, the void that is art. This exhibition heightened the presences of this void, there is no form of articulation of this indefinable, always evasive substance, so the exhibition wished to act as a metaphorical/physical embodiment of ‘Arts’ existence. The void for Billy Dante speaks of the process, alchemy and/or metamorphosis. It is the journey between two, and the mystique that exists in this area. Be it between fact and fiction, abstraction and figuration, it is the thing that hovers between two posts and floats beyond the point of definition. To let it be art.
