'Posing as a subject amongst subjects', Michelle Deignan

Michelle Deignan’s new and recent work takes on the construction and easy acceptance of imagery’s presentation, the swallowed syntax and now unspoken tricks that are accepted as the normal mode of address. Her moving image and photographic work draws on elements of the documentary, placing them slightly askew, or more prominently on an audiovisual pedestal, to make them more than a bit self-conscious of their apparent authority. They speak, both explicitly and evidently, of their own inception and construction. We are placed as a questionable audience, or maybe a walk-in guest to something akin to a multimedia editing room, piecing together the disparate contrived performances taking place in front of us.

But her real protagonist may be the casual snapper, who by taking the photo has placed themselves within a matrix of viewership and receivership, apparently choosing their delightful shots from an individual free will, while at the same time the perpetuator of a pre-determined set of postcard images.

Michelle Deignan is based in London. Recent exhibitions include ‘Based on a True Story’, ArtSway, ‘Oneriography,’ Green on Red Gallery Dublin, and ‘Terror and the Sublime’ in the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. Her work has also been included at screenings in Mains D’Oevres, Paris, The Public, West Bromich and Picture This, Bristol.