David Raymond Conroy
Friday, 6 July 2012
Work from Construction and Modification.
“David Raymond Conroy brings together three works that have loss, removal and absence at their heart. Through editing, removal and reduction the pieces meditate on the relationship between unperceived labour and actualized product. Conroy presents an attempt to share experience through, and in acknowledgement of, the artwork’s own duplicity – its consumption and its generosity.
In the exhibition are four large black monochromes. These are acoustic panels built using instructions taken from online hi-fi and home studio recording websites. Named after the forums whose members conceived the designs, the panels offer a variety of techniques for absorbing the echoes from a room, for deadening sound. Using differing materials pulled over variously sized and shaped stretchers these forms assert a monumentality of absence.
Considering Considered (2011) is a transmitted radio broadcast of the artist reading the edited transcript of a radio-program, which eulogizes an un-named writer. The apparent emotive content of the program is paralleled by its technical discussion on the uses of sentiment in expressive writing. Both an attempt to express loss adequately and a gainful manipulation of these terms, the work forms a treatise on the efficacy and benefit of labour itself.
The work Well Begun is Half Done (2010-11) is a group of framed photographic images each of which depicts an oddly cropped or inconsequential scene. Each image is one half of a double page photographic spread from a coffee table style illustrated travel book, the two page image having been bisected at the book’s central binding. Each newly presented image is complete in itself while at the same time it is apparent that something is missing. They are one step removed and two steps closer to what they present.” – Seventeen Gallery