Output details

‘One + One’ includes works in performance, video, drawing, sculpture and collage. It was a solo exhibition commission for Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda (Mar/April 2012) which subsequently toured to Wexford Arts Centre (July/Aug 2012). The project was initiated during a funded residency at the artist-run space, The Rea Garden, in Birmingham in 2010, which culminated in a public live reading of all the proper nouns from James Joyce’s Ulysses, documentation of which formed the basis of subsequent video works and drawings for the Irish exhibition. The project was supported by a €14,500 visual art bursary from the Irish Arts Council

‘One + One’ is a complex, multi-layered group of works, intended to operate together as an environment. As an exhibition it is adaptable, site-responsive and highly experiential for the viewer. It explores the viewer’s capacity for ethical subjectivity through the particularities of the artwork’s performative aesthetics, as viewer, rather than a non-contemplative participator. The aesthetic strategies include metonymic and referential slippage, constantly shifting and undermining centre(s) and subject(s) and a non-medium specific approach incorporating live performance, video, drawing, objects, collage, sound, text and installation.

The first iteration of ‘One+One’ at Highlanes Gallery utilized the double-height gallery dominated by the Franciscan church’s original altarpiece in a site-responsive installation, with work staged using a scenographic approach. Locations, physical props and environments for viewing are built in to the exhibition, as becoming familiar in presentations by artists such as Phillippe Parreno, Aernaut Mik, David Claerbout, Fiona Crisp, Gail Pickering, Lindsay Sears and Martin Beck. The viewing context is now implicit to the content of the artist’s work.

In ‘One + One’ everything is in contingent relationship to everything else. The viewer becomes part of this contingency. The work’s five key motifs are: the oval, the railtrack, the absorbed figure, the props of staging and cinema (curtains, lights, cameras) and the proper noun (names of people or places). These appear in changing forms and temporalities throughout the work, with differing degrees of presence, constantly shifting between the real and the representational.

The new aspect of ‘One+One’ for McLeer is that it is highly populated, replete with figures: God, gods, Satan, the Virgin Mary, the angel Gabriel, Jean Luc Godard, James Joyce, the artist, the audience, Robert F Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, the mourners, the characters in Ulysses, Gabriel Orozco, Paul Fusco, Piero della Francesco, the cameramen, the singer, and the woman reading.