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‘The Road (After McCarthy)’ was included in ‘Beyond The Frontier’, a contemporary video art exhibition curated by Deidre Southey, screened in shop windows throughout New Ross. The exhibiting artists were Mary-Ruth Walsh, Alan Butler, Brigid McLeer, Wolfgang Lehrner and Emily Richardson, who were invited to make new video works for the event. Organised by the Arts Department of Wexford County Council in association with New Ross Town Council, the exhibition engages with the major celebrations of JFK50 The Homecoming, in commemoration of John F Kennedy’s visit to New Ross, his ancestral hometown, in 1963. The exhibition aimed to explore ideas of the future, ‘utopia’ and landscape. Videos were all silent and shown throughout the town in public spaces

McLeer produced a 20 min text-based single screen video for this event, using the novel ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy as source. ‘The Road (After McCarthy)’ responded to his dystopic and bleak vision of the future, saved by the intimacy of the novel’s two main characters (father and son). McLeer’s video placed the many instances of the words ‘dark’ and ‘okay’ in a temporal sequence as small white text on a black background. This new, equivocal narrative sits, in the blackness of the unknown, which is also the black reflective mirror of the monitor’s screen, in the present as much as in the future. The viewer is implicated in possible futures (dark, or okay), consistent with McLeer’s ongoing interest in the viewer as an ethical subject. The work proceeded from the identification of a textual ‘set’, extracting and exposing this set in another form and medium. It was made with its public street context in mind, and it follows on from another video piece shown as a projection in shop windows in two Irish towns as part of ‘SWITCH’, curated by Triona Ryan and Harald Turek, 2010.

Appropriation strategies, such as in this work, no longer operate simply as critique (as in earlier work by Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, or even Warhol) but offer more of an exploration of various kinds of social, historical, political or semiotic slippage. This work shares an interest in quotation as a form of re-enactment with video artists such as Phillippe Parreno, Aernout Mik, Pierre Huyghe or Nancy Davenport. The visual, temporal and spatial ‘staging’ of this work is fundamental to the way the viewer becomes destabilised and implicated in the new meanings generated by this collision, creating a new address to the viewer and a challenge to reconsider their knowledge, expectations or allegiances.