Disappearances
2 screen video installation
Super 8 and 16mm transferred to digital
Sound by Caroline McCarthy
12 mins
2009
Gathering material from various sources; filming, photographing, collecting found images/sounds and writing are the main points of departure. Delving into a parallel world of sorts, investigating, not unlike the tradition of spiritualist, animistic cultures and hermeticism, the presence of anima and its manifestations and representations. Staging moments of resistance, cultural acts where aesthetics and politics conjoin to re-assert otherness in humans, nature and objects. Queer subjectivity, sexuality, ritual and spirituality, disappearance, failure, the politics of observation appear throughout her work.
Imagine Memory as a library, as an immense archive methodically ordered by files. A visual living system made up of fragments. Collecting moving images by means of analogue and digital technologies, which become part of a personal archive with which she assembles her films. Exploring a variety of filmic media and postproduction process, connecting moving images and spoken words. Intertwining meaning and non linear narratives, navigating dreamscapes that reveal subtle forms of political engagement. Consciousness is enveloped in a poetic allure. The juxtaposition of daily life elements and staged scenarios seem to articulate the aesthetic development of the uncharted plots her films convey. In her works, O’Malley reveals a profound sense of absurdity, fantasy, ghosts and dreams: perhaps to be considered as a feature related to her fondness of the Irish literary tradition and her readings of Beckett, Joyce and the French post structuralists Deleuze & Guattari, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigary to name a few.
Fernando Andrés Barrera, 2014
© 2023 Doireann O´Malley