Frith Street Gallery

JAKI IRVINE: Another Difficult Sunset

7 April 1997 – 26 April 1997

Related Artists: Jaki Irvine

Frith Street Gallery is pleased to announce a new video installation by Jaki Irvine which will make use of the four separate spaces of the gallery. In the late ’80s Irvine was one of a group of Dublin-based artists called Blue Funk and has been working independently since 1992. The new video installation, Another Difficult Sunset follows on from a body of work made either in super-8 film or video and projection which exploits an idiosyncratic use of narrative usually combining narrator, moving image and a musical score. Her work has been seen in a previous show at Frith Street Gallery, Four Projects, and she recently showed a two-part video installation, Losing Doris, in Pandaemonium at the ICA, London.

Speaking about her practice Irvine has said:
“I’ve been thinking about the limits of a certain visibility that attaches itself to living privately, in public…and about those points where what at first seems most available to understanding, slowly turns opaque, revealing itself as misleading or meaningless. If this then opens out a sense of untold distances between things, and people, it also brings with it a desire for the reverse, gesturing towards impossibly compensatory intimacies between ourselves and the world… towards a belief in the transparency and agreement of things – of gestures, smiles, meanings, chance remarks and strangers.”

Another Difficult Sunset shifts from monitor to monitor through the various rooms of Frith Street Gallery as it traces the movements of two people, a man and a woman, who are travelling across London towards a similar destination. They wait on platforms, walk down tunnels, sit on trains, emerge from the crowds of commuters and lose themselves again as another narrative slowly begins to materialise. It involves the death of a keeper in a wildlife park, overheard conversations about lions and tigers, a dog and some women in a park, and the question of how and whether to speak…to plants, to dogs, to one another. Meanwhile a man is smoking a cigarette outside the tiger’s enclosure in London zoo and a woman is getting off a train.