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everything can be done,

in principle

Opens Saturday 9th June – 26 August 2012. Roller skating is encouraged in the gallery

Special event 8th June: a musical performance on opening night by David Mansfield, original composer for the film Heaven’s Gate. Further screenings and talks to be announced

Outlined in the banditti of the plains by A.S. Mercer, (1894) a band of fifty-two cattlemen and hired gunmen invaded Johnson Country, Wyoming, in April 1892 killing and terrorizing the settlers. Through the raising of the timber and canvas roller skating rink within the gallery, Duggan’s ambitious installation transports gallery visitors through the frontier lands of Wyoming and American Western Cinema as seen in Michael Cimino’s Heavens’s Gate (1980). Duggan invites the public to participate in a public activity, to skate in costume, in the place and time of the Johnson County’s war, suggesting this trope allows Ireland of 21st century to explore notions of its social identity.

Heaven’s Gate (c) Michael Cimino 1980 United Artists

Within the extraordinary galleries of VISUAL Carlow, in collaboration between Eigse Carlow Arts Festival, VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art and the Carlow Local Authorities Arts Office, visitors will glide across a pristine timber floor and allowing dreams a chance to seem real, where social integration seems entirely possible. As in Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, this haven exists against the realities of resistance and harsh economics of a world in the full throttle of seismic change. History records this time in terms of progress and innovation - a new world of railways, immigrant workers, pioneering construction, evolving power and government organisation – all moving into a new era. Duggan suggests the lens of Cimino’s version of the cattlemen / homesteader conflict in the American frontier serves as a model to examine the story of a post boom, IMF-subjugated Ireland which is again dealing with issues of seismic migrations. He also posits the inherent fragility of parallel versions of history in physically creating the space within a space. Where Walter Benjamin suggests the raising of Carthage as a rupture with potential catharsis, in ‘‘Everything can be done, in principle’, Duggan wonders is truth the starting point, or is it at all possible to know what truth is.

Heaven’s Gate (c) Michael Cimino 1980 United Artists

Within this new commission the resilient human spirit in poor, powerless communities and its standoffs with official power is recognised. The urgency around happiness and basic safety, even its possibility, uncovers a social tension in this exquisite troubled place.

The TA Ranch, Wyoming circa 1880

Cimino's film Heaven’s Gate is a film which broke all the rules and supported true art through an often ruthless pursuit of authenticity, to the extent of challenging the prevailing powerful studio system. Often seen as the beginning of money men era, Heaven’s Gate marked a changing moment for maverick auteur film directing and the role of the producer. It also branded the Western in clear class struggle, selected social agenda terms.

Artist Brian Duggan (b. 1971) lives and works in Dublin. His practice examines the prevailing conditions when things go wrong, and the sites of stress and breakage. Citing well known historical events as well as the overlooked small dramas of the everyday, he brings physical challenges into the gallery as an interrogative method, exerting pressure and pushing boundaries. From 1996 to 2009, Duggan was a co-founder and co-director of Pallas Studios, Heights and Projects one of the longest running independent artist run spaces in Ireland. He has received many awards, including Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland, and South Dublin County Council. In 2011, he was selected for the Artists’ Residency Programme in the Irish Museum of Modern Art. He was commissioned to make new work for the inaugural Dublin Contemporary 2011. In 2012 his work is in solo exhibition in RuaRed Dublin, group exhibitions in the Lyndecker gallery Spain, National Sculpture Factory Cork, Limerick City Gallery of Art, and Braziers Supernormal UK. His work is included in the Permanent National Collections of the Hugh lane Gallery and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. www.brianduggan.net

Curator Helen Carey is currently Director / Curator of Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland. She curates independent projects concerned with cultural identity, historical events and the public realm. She was previously inaugural Director of the Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris.