Butler Gallery is pleased to present Meantime, a mixed media exhibition combining photography and film by David Stephenson with a selection of poetry by Mark Granier.

The central theme of Meantime is transience and the spirit of passing, life’s marginality. As Seamus Heaney put it in his poem, Postscript, ‘You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass…’.

Such things include, in this instance, damaged or fragmentary photographs from photo albums, the root-plates of upturned trees, net curtains in an abandoned house that might suggest a phantom wood. Stephenson has always been drawn to the idea of a house as a soundbox, a witness to the lives that were shaped by that particular arrangement of walls and surfaces, windows, the faces that peered through those windows and what they looked out on. Houses generally outlast us. Compared to a house and its furnishings, we are ephemeral, speeded-up films, shadows in mirrors. The idea of a presence in absence is a central theme.

His portraits of people embody a kind of stillness and private reverie. a fascination with that contradictory aspect of existence: its ephemerality and its solidity, ghosts, memories and erasures.

Granier’s poems do not interpret or comment on the films or photographs, but compliment them tonally, encounters that are in the same orbit. Like Stephenson, he has always been drawn to resonant images that possess the ability to haunt and linger.

Stephenson’s aim is to create works that connect through their earthiness and vulnerability, convergences of mortality and sensuality. As Susan Sontag wrote: “All photographs are memento mori. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

The exhibition will be installed at the Butler Gallery as a series of visual thoughts or memories. Unframed photographs of varying sizes will be interspersed with Granier’s poetry. Some images will stand alone; others will appear in groups, and the narrative connections linked by the barest of threads.

David Stephenson is a fine art photographer and filmmaker from Dublin. His work has been exhibited at The Hunt Museum, Limerick; RHA Gallery, twice as invited artist; Municipal Gallery, DLR Lexicon; National Portrait Gallery, London; Angela Flowers Gallery, London; a group exhibition of works from Local Authorities’ collections (30 Years, Artists, Places); and the solo show Slant at Photo Museum Ireland.
He was the winner of the National Gallery portrait prize, the Ballinglen Museum’s first biennial open exhibition photography prize as well as the Royal Ulster academy open exhibition photography prize all in 2023. In 2024/25 he will undertake a commission for the National gallery of Ireland for their portrait collection.

In spring 2025 he will be exhibiting a selection of his photographic/film work and giving a talk about his practise at the Irish cultural centre, Hammersmith London.
Stephenson cites Eugene Richards and Saul Leiter as influences. Stephenson’s multi award- winning short film Raymond is an elegiac portrait of an elderly man’s recollections of life on the Irish border. One of his current works-in-progress, Main Street Bray, is a film/ photographic project. Link to an interview with VAI   (Visual Artists Ireland online publication.)