News 2003



Victor Sloan: Selected Works

West Cork Arts Centre, Ireland.

10 October to 2 November 2003













© Victor Sloan

Victor Sloan Selected Works 1980 - 2000
will feature in the West Cork Arts Centre from 10 October to 2 November 2003. The official opening will take place on Saturday 11 October at 2.30pm and will be performed by Jo Kerrigan, journalist. The opening will be preceded by a talk by the artist, Victor Sloan, about his work.

This is a major exhibition of Sloan’s work examining the whole range of his photographic practice in which he has been engaged over the past twenty years.

Throughout this time Sloan has been particularly associated with a body of work which has explored the Orange Order and its marching season. While the exhibition acknowledges the significance of this series of work it also aims to reassess earlier and later works, the Craigavon series, theCircus series, which present a much broader area of study.

Victor Sloan’s photographic work has substantially consisted of a hybridisation of painting and photography. He was also conscious that, in exhibiting photographs in an art context, people might dismiss them as being "just photographs", and he instinctively wanted to make that kind of response difficult, to present the viewer with something photographic that was not exactly a photograph.

Most of Sloan’s work is firmly rooted in Northern Ireland, in its subject matter and its immediate concerns. He has moved from the subject matter of Belfast zoo to treat an expanding range of paradigmatic social spaces and environments, including the resort town of Bangor, the new city of Craigavon, the field in which the Orange Order marchers congregate, the circus and the sports stadium.

In the light of everything he has done since Belfast Zoo, it is reasonable to conclude that the marks, the various kinds of interference, so to speak, that disrupt the optimal clarity of the image, make visible the usually invisible substrata, the sectarianism, the workaday tensions, the implicit threat of violence, underlying the apparent normality of life in Northern Ireland. More, there is perhaps the implication that just as the images sometimes seem to be consumed from within, specific political and cultural groupings in Northern Ireland might be poisoned by their own histories or their own historical myths.

Equally, we can read even the spatial fabric of the prints as representative…of emblematic environments - and the marks and strains wrought upon the photographic negatives and subsequent prints equate to tensions and breaks in the social fabric itself.

Postal Address
West Cork Arts Centre
North Street
Skibbereen
Co Cork
Ireland

Phone: + 353 28 22090
Fax: + 353 28 23237
email: info@westcorkartscentre.com

www.riverbank.ie/


Opening Hours
Monday - Saturday
10.00 am - 5.00 pm


Directions The West Cork Arts Centre is accessible by taking the N71 from Cork through Bandon and Clonakilty. Situated beside St. Patricks Cathedral.

This article comes from Talk Ireland








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A Broken Surface: Victor Sloan

Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Ireland

9 - 28 February 2003


© Victor Sloan


An exhibition of work by Victor Sloan will be opened at the Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge on Sunday 9th February at 3.00 pm and will continue until Friday 28th February.

Victor Sloan was born in Dungannon, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland in 1945. He now lives and works in Portadown, Co Armagh. The works in this exhibition are selected from a body of work produced by Sloan over a 20 year period. His ‘photoworks’, in many cases hybrids of photography and painting, comment on various political, social and cultural aspects of Northern Ireland. The distressed surface of the photographs reflect the many varied contexts through which any given image can be viewed.

Much of Sloan’s work deals with life in the North of Ireland. However, in 1993 and 1994, Sloan visited Borne Sulinowo in Poland. The Soviet Army, who had vacated the town overnight in 1992, had left an unusual collection of objects and memorabilia behind them which form the theme of a number of the works included in this exhibition.

On Thursday 20th of February at 8.00 pm, Victor Sloan will give an illustrated talk, ‘Not Just a Record’ where he will discuss some of the work he has produced over the last 20 years. Sloan will discuss the origin of his subject matter, how he finds it – or it finds him, and the various photographic and painting/drawing techniques he employs to achieve his techniques.

Gallery opening hours are:
Monday to Saturday, 10 am to 1 pm and 2 pm to 5pm.

For further information, please contact:
CatrĂ­ona Fallon
Riverbank Arts Centre, Main Street, Newbridge, Co Kildare

Tel: 045 448315
Email: artscentre@riverbank.ie info@kildare.ie






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The Vacuum Raffle

Belfast Exposed

13 November to 12 December 2003



Andy Warhol by Weegee


A fundraising event for the free paper The Vacuum.

Participating Photographers: Weegee | Donovan Wylie | Victor Sloan | Tom Wood | Claudio Hils | Elina Medley | David Bate | John Duncan | Gareth McConnell | Mary McIntyre | Phil Collins | Sean Hillen | Malen Starrett | Stephanie Grebe | Mark Curran | Martin Parr | Bill Kirk | David Farrell | Ursula Burke | Xavier Ribas | Peter Finnemore | Padraig Murphy, | Mari Mahr | Ann Marie Curran | Sean McKernan | Paul Quinn | Paul Cunningham | Andreas Gefelle

The Vacuum is a free monthly paper published in Belfast. Each issue is themed and contains critical commentary about the city and broader cultural issues.

The Vacuum is published by Factotum

Factotum
112-114 Donegal Street
Belfast BT1 2GX

028 90330893

info@factotum.org.uk
www.factotum.org.uk
www.thevacuum.org.uk



Belfast Exposed Photography
The Exchange Place
23 Donegall Street
Belfast
BT1 2FF
Northern Ireland

Web: www.belfastexposed.org
Email: info@belfastexposed.org
Telephone: +44 02890 230965
Fax: +44 02890 314343

Gallery opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 11am to 5pm - Saturday 11am to 5pm