Swiftian Drift
Kevin Kavanagh presents Swiftian Drift, a summer exhibition featuring artists Elaine Byrne, Sean Lynch and Ulrich Vogl.
Since 2008 Kevin Kavanagh has held exhibitions at Chancery Lane in close proximity to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, once home to the essayist and nineteenth-century figure Jonathan Swift. Known globally for works such as Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729), today he is still considered one of the foremost and complex prose satirists in the history of literature. Swiftian Drift considers this legacy today, as his critique of Eurocentric and extractive characteristics of the Enlightenment seems more relevant than any time before.
A collection of artworks from Ulrich Vogl atmospherically question the ideals of domestic and insular thought that Swift sought to critique. Lumps of stone are placed into furniture, rendering chairs and tables seemingly functionless. Picture postcards of bourgeois interiors are faded by the sun, beside wall sculptures of faraway lands, all pointing to the containment and alienation we know of modern forms of dwelling in the Western world.
In a new series of photographs and accompanying text, Elaine Byrne reveals her reading of the last part of Gulliver’s Travels. Portraits of horses refer to his encounter with ‘Houyhnhnms’ - rational equine beings, calm and reliable in character - who are contrasted in the narrative with Yahoos, savage humanoid creatures no better than beasts of burden. This, in the artist’s words, points to Gulliver’s conundrum of his own humanity, one of ‘psychological disillusionment, confusion, and a mounting alienation from his own species’.
Sean Lynch’s large-scale photograph and sculptures, culled from fieldwork throughout Ireland and at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, recall the enduring symbolism of medieval imagery, its history of satire and forms of allegory, seen in his long-term interests in stonecarving and architectural decoration. In addition to the exhibition, Kevin Kavanagh recommends gallery visitors to walk close by to the corner of Golden Lane and Bride Street to view, on high, eight trompe sculptures based on Gulliver’s Travels, completed in 1998 by Michael Kane.
