C106
review
Derry:
Consuming Identities at Context Gallery and Workhouse
Museum
Consuming
Identities is the
culmination of a one-year cross-community project with
two Derry schools, Clondermott High School and St Peter's
High School.
The project,
designed and facilitated by artist Damien Duffy, came
from the schools' being awarded the northern Arts Council's
Artist in Education Award.
Duffy's aim
was to give the participants (aged fourteen and fifteen)
the opportunity to
This manifested
itself in four related bodies of work, aiming to explore
the nature of the youth culture with which the participants
are bombarded. The result was image overload, the first
piece consisting of collaged pictures from magazines of
pop musicians, sports stars, actors, cartoon characters,
packaging, along with related text - headlines, ransom-letter
constructs and logos. The collages contain multiple images,
juxtaposed and layered with all the chaos of a youthful
bedroom wall, echoing the barrage of fast-edited, immediately
readable, easily consumed pop culture produced for young
people. The collages were hung together, touching, to
make one single object, any sense of individuality removed,
merged into a map of shared cultural confusion. In relation
to the aim of the project to explore means of self-expression,
the work is successful in illustrating the limitations
placed on this freedom by the battering our consciousness
receives from the cultural marketplace.
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Consuming
Identities,
installation shot; courtesy Context Gallery
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From the
collages, students selected rectangular sections, which
formed the basis of paintings, executed with skill and
dexterity not usually seen in a schools project, especially
considering the limitations of the materials available.
The isolation of a section of collage gave the artists
an opportunity to give their paintings compositional coherence,
but again they were hung together, collaged in a single
unit. This reintroduced the chaos of the collage, again
illustrating the disjointed nature of 'yoof culture'.
The other
two parts of the show refer to graffiti, perhaps the most
significant example of what passes for self-expression
for disaffected young people. One consists of logos, based
on their names - following the form of tagging, which
is in itself an attempt at pushing one's individuality,
in face of the uniformity imposed by the cultural industry
illustrated in the first two works, but which paradoxically
conforms to a set of calligraphic rules.
The final
piece is a frieze of life-size cardboard cut out silhouettes
of the students' bodies, leaning against the walls, with
text and images painted across them. Again, images and
text take the form of graffiti, written across the walls
that many young people lean against when they meet on
the streets in the evenings. The content repeats the themes
in the rest of the exhibition - names of football clubs,
musicians, cannabis leaves, the Jolly Roger, flowers,
flames and the Ferrari logo - as well as slogans, such
as Music Is Life, Girls Rule Boys Drule!!,
Life Sucks and, censored with playing-card suits,
Šit happens and Žit happens.
Consuming
Identities is, then, a testimony to the frustrations
of youth; the desire to explore and express one's individuality,
but finding that the only means of doings so are provided
by media industries whose marketing interests are served
by ensuring uniform desire.
Colin
Darke is an artist based in Derry.
Consuming
Identities, Context Gallery and Workhouse Museum,
Derry, September/October, 2003
