FADE TO BLACK

The Library Project, 4 Temple Bar, Dublin 2
9th – 25th September 2021
Opening hours: 12 – 6pm, Tues – Sat

‘Fade to Black’ presents work by eight artists – Robert Barry, David Blamey, Chloe Brenan, Et n’est-ce*, Hazel Egan, John Lalor, Catriona Leahy, Anja Mahler, Yoko Ono, Sarah Pierce, Endre Tot, Ian Wilson.

The editing instruction ‘Fade to Black’ generally refers to the end of a film where the cinematic image fades into a solid black image that fills the screen before the text based production credit sequence. It forms the non-specified durational space between the closing of an often fictional narrative into the factual account of its making.

Watching a film can be understood as inhabiting a realm of time, a protracted present tense, where the viewer maps the pastness of a recorded event onto their experience of the presentness of its viewing. Print also has the capacity to explore time not just in terms of its content but through the act of producing copies, in its repetitive capacity wherein each copy or moment while unique is repeated as part of a sequence or event. Each instance, as a point of present, accumulates from other domains of temporality to form a record, both imagined and factual.

The exhibition ‘Fade to Black’ explores ideas about time and its lapses within the languages of cinema, performance and printmaking, presenting works that engage in instances between figuration and abstraction, the fictional and facticity, narration and documentation.

Curated by Joe Walker and Grace Weir on behalf of Black Church Print Studio.

Project funded by Dublin City Council.