Skip to Content

VISUAL CULTURE

With Intent

Andrew Kearney

Following on from the chronometric installations, Long Thin Thread at Heathrow, and Isn’t it Normal at PS1 in NYC, in 1999, With Intent sought to open up speculative possibilities for meaning in terms of how people might engage or interpret a given work of art. The series of five interrelated installation works use sound, space, video, light, the measured presence of the audience, the shifting weather conditions and the movement within the building structure to provoke a tension between private language and public discourse. Using multi-stranded research methods, the project was concerned with exploring and understanding how, through audiences’ engagement with these phenomena, one might shift from momentary personal reverie to something approaching communal memory. This research also informed the project Illumination (2002), installed at the Boiler House on the Ballymun Estate in Dublin.

Andrew Kearney, Time to Time (2001), Limerick City Gallery of Art, 
Limerick, Ireland

A maroon fibreglass cast bust of 17th century romanticised war figure sits inside a red Perspex tank lit from within the shelf, which sits above eye level on the gallery wall. A 15-minute DVD loop displayed on five monitors depicts black balloons, being blown around by fans on the basement floor, in varying time frames. These could also be seen in ‘real time’ when viewing the video, Watching (see below) through a steel grate in the gallery floor.

Andrew Kearney, Thread (2001), Limerick City Gallery of Art, 
Limerick, Ireland

Sixty seven-digit LED counters with memory, linked by a central processor to various sensors in the gallery. Recording activities and movement within the gallery, the central processor produces various count streams based on received data.

Andrew Kearney, NightShade (2001), Limerick City Gallery of Art, 
Limerick, Ireland

Five photographs, showing an external landscape by night. Mounted on top of 8-by-4 foot plywood sheets leaning against a wall and perforated with holes, through which light bulbs are strung, these elegiac images were of storm-felled and sawn-off tree trunks in a city park. The bulbs’ luminosity rises and falls at various cyclical rates controlled by a central dimmer system.

Andrew Kearney, Silence (2001), Limerick City Gallery of Art,  
Limerick, Ireland

A five-metre diameter orb, held in place by air pressure, is trapped between the roof and floor of the gallery. A microphone collects street sounds, subsequently processed through a sound-effects unit while simultaneously being translated into a light movement within the orb. Finally combined with a 30-second loop of waves crashing on the sea shore, these wave sounds are abstracted by being played through a external subwoofer.

Andrew Kearney, Watching (2001), Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick,   
Ireland

A two-screen 15-minute looped film consisting of manipulated footage of the artist’s body as he slowly moves around in the restrictive, blue-lit confines of the gallery’s underground boiler room.

Profile / Projects / CV / Contact / www.andrewkearney.net