126, supported by TULCA Visual Arts Festival 2009, is pleased to present new work by Ken Fandell. This is his first solo project in Ireland and in Europe. Fandell often approaches site-specific pieces for sites that he is removed from. Between Me and Galway Bay is a varied investigation of contemporary mythologising, commodifying and romanticising of Ireland, done from a distance of more than 3,500 miles.
The creation of this site-specific body of work continues Fandell’s engagement with the effects of considering the quotidian alongside the romantic grandeur of time and space. Fandell was asked to create a small body of new work to respond to the Galway region, an area he has visited many times. As the focus of this exhibition Fandell ‘stitches’ together photographs into long scrolls that dominate the length of the gallery. Other works include video and sound-based pieces. Fandell’s tongue-in-cheek approach uses points of reference such as Frank A. Fahey’s song Galway Bay, Robert J. Flaherty’s film Man of Aran and a Chicago pub called ‘Galway Bay’ near Fandell’s residence. Through this installation Fandell scrutinises issues of distance, repetition, commodification and absurdity through an oscillation between the poetic and the crass, the romantic and the banal.
Ken Fandell (USA, b. 1971) has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include Defining Moments in Photography, 1967-2007 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, (Chicago, IL); In Words: The Art of Language at The University of Delaware (Newark, DE); Antennae at the Houston Center for Photography (Houston, TX). His work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is currently hanging in the U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria. He has received awards from Artadia and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. He lives and works in Chicago.
