Sean Lynch | Solo Exhibition | as part of Galway International Arts Festival 2022

Galway Arts Centre is delighted to present a new solo exhibition by Sean Lynch as part of Galway International Arts Festival 2022.

Sean Lynch’s artworks continue to reveal delicate narratives and surprising histories about the places humanity creates and inhabits, dissecting the beliefs, values and practices that underline the daily existence of the western world. Working closely with actor Gina Moxley and spread over two floors at Galway Arts Centre, Lynch’s new exhibition continues to further these interests, presenting two substantial artworks, debuting new video and sculptural installations.

Initially assembled from experiences and conversations had during the artist’s travel in Europe and North America, What Is An Apparatus? is an ever-expanding collection of short videos. Nineteen vignettes play for over an hour at GAC, encountering nuclear submarines, postmodern architecture, Ivy League colleges, robots, scrap yards, tin mines, folk parades and supermarkets. Upon viewing Lynch’s spiraling narratives, it becomes apparent that the stories being told are generated as the result of living in an increasingly technocratic life. New sequences debuted in Galway explore representations of COVID-19 at last year’s Scarecrow Festival in the village of Leap in Cork; the return of office workers following pandemic lockdowns in Melbourne’s Central Business District; and increasing paranoia about the number of mobile phone masts appearing throughout the Irish countryside.

A new configuration of Tak’ Tent O’ Time Ere Time Be Tint is installed across the second floor galleries. The installation was first presented as part of last year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, produced in the midst of ongoing civil tensions in the UK’s culture wars and discussion over the presence of colonial statuary in the city. Tak’ Tent O’ Time Ere Time Be Tint is a memento mori Scottish slang expression, seen written by the artist in concrete inside at a builders yard in Edinburgh, acting as a reminder to make the most of the time we have here together.

Sean Lynch’s recent work includes solo exhibitions at Rose Art Museum, Boston; Modern Art Oxford; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, and Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main. His artworks have been included in group and survey exhibitions at CAPC Bordeaux; CentroCentro, Madrid; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, and Camden Arts Centre, London. He is represented by Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, and Ronchini Gallery, London. Alongside Michele Horrigan, he works at Askeaton Contemporary Arts, an artist-led residency, commissioning and publication initiative situated in the west of Ireland since 2006. Lynch is currently presenting a major public art project and curatorial project, Distant Things Appear Suddenly Near, commissioned by the City of Melbourne until 2023. He represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2015.