Summer 2005 - Limerick: Mark O'Kelly (and Sarah Pierce) at Limerick City Gallery of Art
CIRCA 112 review  | | Mark O'Kelly and Sarah Pierce: Caged archive , 2005; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery | Mark O'Kelly has departed somewhat from the standard Painting Exhibition formula to include, in his current show at Limerick City Gallery of Art, the installation Caged archive , a work designed in collaboration with the artist, Sarah Pierce. Caged archive is a selection of O'Kelly's research neatly housed in a padlocked metal cage sited amid his paintings in the South Gallery. It is a well held secret that the visitor may make an appointment with the gallery staff to enter the cage and enjoy a supervised browse through the carefully archived material. Once admitted, a white-gloved handler will respectfully guide the guest over the ordered contents of the perspex boxes, the coloured manila folders and arranged scatterings of documents on a side table. The privileged inspector of this information gains not only an intimate insight into an aspect of the artist's practice normally withheld from public view, but also a chance to play detective, absorbing clues that allow one to trace the creation of some of the exhibited paintings back to their tangible points of origin. Such investigation exposes energetic rivalry between images competing for final selection to appear on canvas, and some of the artist's aesthetic scruples in the primitive design stages. For example, sifting through this history reveals that several pages of chairs auditioned for the part of the Chair in the painting, Table and chair (2001) and a back catalogue of catwalk models vied for the painter's attention before Yohji and Cristobel strutted onto canvas.  | | Mark O'Kelly: Yohji , 2004, oil on linen; courtesy Kevin Kavanagh Gallery | Through Caged archive , O'Kelly and Pierce present archiving as a fine art. The scraps and cuttings, cartoons and sketches are organised and filed with librarian precision. Dates are faithfully recorded, making it possible to follow accurate chronologies of the artist's progressions of thought and their filtration into his painting practice. O'Kelly, a self-professed hoarder, is a meticulous one. Poring over the available evidence, no dog-ears embarrass the collection, no ragged newspaper edges betray a hasty decision. Each fragment has been treated with museum reverence, each printed fossil painstakingly preserved. But Caged archive is also a knowingly self-conscious cull. Within their respective artistic practices both O'Kelly and Pierce explore editorial behaviours and individual and collective responsibilities in the fabrication of histories. O'Kelly's interest in the mechanisms underlying how and what we perceive, and in the systems and patterns governing these selections, is embedded in his research and articulated to a wider audience through his paintings. Considered together with Archive , these works draw attention to the inevitable subject at the heart of information management and manipulation. Stepping outside the cage, enriched (and, indeed, perhaps slightly smug) with one's private discoveries, the act of looking at the paintings that constitute the larger part of this exhibition is underwritten by little revelations which unlock new understandings of the works' construction. Ciara Finnegan is an artist based in Limerick.
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