Frith Street

Jaki Irvine

15 Sep - 28 Oct 2005

JAKI IRVINE
Towards a Polar Sea
16 September - 28 October 2005

Frith Street Gallery is pleased to announce a new video installation by Jaki Irvine. This piece was inspired by the story of the mid-nineteenth century explorer John Franklin who disappeared, along with the rest of his team, in the arctic whilst trying to discover the Northwest Passage.
Whilst reading Franklin's exploits, Irvine discovered that he had in fact lived for a time at number 60 Frith Street, the current location of the gallery, while writing his memoirs of his travels.

Towards a Polar Sea takes as its starting point Franklin's account of his first disastrous expedition in the frozen wastes of the North Pole and combines this with the life of the present day Frith Street Gallery.

This led the artist in turn to wonder about "how we imagine a future for ourselves and pitch ourselves towards it, based on what we understand/imagine the past to have been."

This multi - screen work is not exclusively about Franklin, rather it creates a sense of time and place, mixing fact with fiction, moving back and forth through history, in order to allow echoes of the past to surface amidst the contemporary world.


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Towards a Polar Sea marks the one hundredth exhibition at Frith Street Gallery since its establishment in 1989. It is accompanied by a special artist's book, which explores further John Franklin's quest for the North West Passage.

Jaki Irvine was born in Dublin in 1966. She was educated at NCAD Dublin and Goldsmith's College London. Recent solo exhibitions include: Henry Moore Institute, Leeds 2005, Galeria Alessandro de March, Milan, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 2004 and Delfina Project Space, London 2001. Recent group exhibitions include: Stranger than Fiction, Arts Council Touring Exhibition, 2004 and A Century of Artist's Film, Tate Britain, 2003. Her large-scale installation On the Silver Bridge will be shown at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in December 2005. Jaki Irvine lives and works in Dublin.
 

Tags: Jaki Irvine, Henry Moore