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C105
Review
Blanchardstown:
Dara McGrath at Draíocht
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Dara McGrath:
N6/M50 Liffey Valley, colour photograph;
courtesy Draíocht
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By a strange twist of irony,
the journey to Draíocht in Blanchardstown
involved negotiating those numerically categorized road
networks that are the subject of Dara McGrath's By
the way. The twelve finely produced prints that
form the exhibition are not of those spaces that make
up the familiar, if monotonous, landscape experienced
on journeys along the state's new motorways, they are
of those invisible spaces that are absent from the cartographers'
maps which are now required to navigate the country's
roads. They are the unmapped local spaces that co-exist
between and beside the globally mapped.
The co-existence
of these spaces is explored in different ways. In N6/M50
Liffey Valley the planted palm trees at the entrance
to a car park display the planners' intention to homogenise
space; only the road signs distinguish this landscape
from any other European or North American terrain. In
N11 Wyattville Junction an uncharted path is trodden
into the landscape by residents of a housing estate. The
Ireland portrayed in this series is a country that is
planned by civil engineers; it is a landscape bypassed
by the functionality of speed and convenience. McGrath's
photographs are a topographical sociology of this new
terrain, a terrain that remains on the margins of the
nation's maps.
Justin
Carville teaches at the Institute of Art, Design and
Technology, Dún Laoghaire.
Dara McGrath:
By the way, Draíocht Arts Centre,
Blanchardstown, July/August 2003
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