BETTY GANNON
Photographs by Betty Gannon
Exhibition curated by Ian Wieczorek
John McGing’s Bar, Westport, Co. Mayo 17 - 27 April 2014
SHROUDED SPIRITS - an Overview
Shrouded Spirits presents the intriguing and incongruous spectacle of wrapped, barricaded and curtained shelves and boxes of alcoholic beverages in a series of photographic images taken around Mayo last Good Friday (29th March 2013), documenting how different retailers in Ireland upheld Ireland’s Intoxicating Liquor Act of 1927. The Act states that shops cannot sell or expose for sale intoxicating liquor on Good Friday.
Gannon’s informal photo-documentation quietly exposes the contradictory tensions of consumerism and prohibition, the result of a historical collusion of Church and State that persists into the present day. While the ‘forbidden’ alcoholic products are still physically present in the shops, on Good Friday they are rendered ‘inaccessible’ through a literal (though clearly transparent) makeshift physical concealment, an action that evokes a complicit air of mystery and secrecy. There is also an implication that the general public cannot - or should not - be trusted to comply with the Law if the
alcoholic products remain in view. This annual phenomenon might even be read as a visible allusion acknowledging the external forces that govern our everyday lives, and also the tacit general acceptance of this expression of non-permissive ‘normality’.
Gannon has taken a small societal anomaly and transformed it into a cogent and incisive interrogation of a broader circumstance. The informal nature of her response, with its implicit humour and lightness of touch, is echoed in the nature and location of its presentation, a local bar subject to the same Act as the subjects depicted in the photographs. In whatever direction her practice leads her, Gannon demonstrates a clarity of vision and a sense of purpose and intentionality, an ability to identify and tease out the easily overlooked significance to be found in the observation of small everyday things.
- Ian Wieczorek, 2014
BETTY GANNON - ARTIST BIOGRAPHY 2014
Betty Gannon is a visual artist living and working in Westport, Co Mayo. Her practice involves drawing, painting, photography and 3D work. Since graduating from the Galway/Mayo Institute of Technology in 2008 she has had seven solo exhibitions and numerous selected group exhibitions throughout Ireland and Northern Ireland. She has also taken part in group exhibitions in Germany, Canada, USA and Italy. Her latest solo exhibition was at The Market Place Arts Centre, Armagh in February 2014. She is currently exhibiting at The Braid Mid-Antrim Museum in a group exhibition curated by Marianne O’Kane Boal, and has a forthcoming group exhibition which she was selected for, later this year at The Ennistymon Court House Gallery, Co Clare.
gannonbetty@gmail.com
www.bettygannon.com