Have you ever been inside the wreckage of a spaceship? Or a performance inside the wreckage of said spaceship? If not, brace yourself for an opportunity to experience one.
Sam Keogh’s Kapton Cadaverine opens tonight in the Kerlin Gallery and few openings have excited me as much. Forget free wine and small talk in front of abstract shapes – this exhibition includes its own amnesiac astronaut who wanders around a spaceship that has crashed into our planet. When and how no one can say – the artist will not be explaining anything as he thinks the audience is a hallucination. Instead he staggers about the ghoulish wreckage trying repair the malfunctioning ship.
Keogh is an Irish artist working in Dublin, London and Amsterdam. He recently completed a residency at the prestigious Rijksakademie and his work has been exhibited widely, both in Ireland and abroad. In the coming year, he’ll be participating in two biennales.
Keogh’s artistic practices are a blend of sculpture, installation and performance, which often blends into unnerving forms. Extremely tactile, even obsessive in their material detail, they combine both the recognisable and the totally abstract. Often the work addresses our relation to the world, both directly and indirectly, in a highly immersive manner.
Keogh also seems to challenge the very space he embodies. While his work is very complex and intricate it simultaneously tears down the notion of “high art” and tradition, opting instead for the fantastical. For his show in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, three years ago, Keogh opened with an exhilarating performance. He frantically raced around the space, setting up primitive looking structures – themselves visual meditations on how we deal with human remains.
For this exhibition Keogh has transformed the interior of the Kerlin Gallery into that of a spacecraft. The control panels, surfaces and remains of metal and plastic machinery, some still meekly glowing, is all ruptured and ridden with grime. Scrap parts litter the floor and goo seeps from the caving structure, all permeated by a barrage of white noise. A lone astronaut marauds the detritus and debris, confused and devastated, as he tries to salvage some sanity from this total ruin and impending madness.
Keogh’s performance will take place from Friday, January 26th, between 6pm and 8pm, and then again at 3pm on Saturday, February 10th. Between performances, an audio recording will continuously be replayed from within the cryopod.
Entry to the exhibition in the Kerlin Gallery is free and the exhibition runs from January 26th to March 10th.
