Official opening: Friday 2 September at 7:30pm

The past 20 years has seen a new strain of photographic idiom: a digitally mediated form in which internal integrity of image has become subordinate to ‘message content’. The mobile phone capture or video still has to a major degree supplanted high quality imagery as the vernacular of reportage and societal experience. In the contemporary experience, imagery has become a form of ‘shorthand’, illustrative rather than exhaustive, and even more subservient to the vagaries of personal interpretation than in former times. This digitally mediated dissemblance, where meaning and interpretation shift away from the specific towards the open-ended, is at the core of this new body of work. Low resolution portrait-style images sourced from the internet or newspapers are rendered in oils on canvas, a process that attempts to instate them within the traditional canon. The images are presented without reference to their original sources, and the faithful rendering of the found imagery, complete with digitally mediated imperfections, results in works that transcend their original journalistic intentions. Residual, ephemeral and ghostly, they become objects of contemplation open to broader interpretation, assuming more malleable, subjective significance.

Ian Wieczorek’s art practice is based primarily in painting and drawing, and more recently curation. Since 2003 he has exhibited widely in group/selected shows in Ireland (including IONTAS 2005; COE/Claremorris Open Exhibition 2009; and CCA:RDS Collective Contemporary Art 2010), N. Ireland, Germany (Kornhäuschen, Aschaffenburg, and turn-berlin gallery, Berlin) and China (411 Galleries, Hangzhou, China Central Academy of Fine Art Gallery, Beijing and Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai). In recent years he has curated a number of shows, most recently BLINK, the Visual Art programme and Art Trail for Westport Arts Festival, in 2010. He has been based in Custom House Studios in Westport since 2007. This is his 6th solo exhibition.