Philip Napier: Expecting the Terror
4th February – 19th March 2011
Ormeau Baths Gallery presents ‘Expecting the Terror’, a major exhibition of work by internationally acclaimed artist Philip Napier.
Issues of connectivity and route making represent significant aspects of our contemporary cultural landscape. ‘Expecting the Terror’ explores a connection between the civil engineering of future space in Northern Ireland in a society with a value system based on consumption, and the imminent opening up of the North West Passage as a major seaway in the Canadian arctic, which would link Europe to China and the Far East.
It was a Northern Irishman, Captain Francis Crozier, who is credited with the discovery of the North West Passage as part of the ill fated Franklin expedition of the 1840s on the HMS Terror, in which all crew members are believed to have died after the ship was frozen in the ice. The North West Passage is gradually opening due to global warming and the shrinking of the ice sheet. Both the historic and the contemporary effort to establish power, sovereignty and control over these barely charted regions have been and are subject to competing national interests. Napier commemorates the significance of this historical event, now enshrined in myth, by using it as the lens through which we view the contemporary relevance of shifting political, economic, consumerist and national hierarchies still dictated to us after centuries by disputes over sovereignity and the expansion of trade-routes.
As power in the world is moving East, Napier’s project has developed as a form of visual amenity. A significant component of this manifestation is a vastly enlarged model of a toy chinese fork lift – a model of distribution. The process of upscaling the model includes the use of Chinese plywood available as the default brand in wood warehouses in Northern Ireland. The artwork also includes a functioning rickshaw amended as a kind of hearse and information point, tracing aspects of the marine heritage of the doomed effort to link to China and Europe. The work produces space through the use of the familiar logistical module of the transport container, which are almost entirely made in China. It is the site of video projection and a kind of central hull docked on to the gallery in the manner of lorry delivery or distribution.
Ballad I and II represent an older body of work. They incorporate iconic images of counter-cultural heros and their reading in this exhibition pose new questions within the new context of contemporary Northern Irish society; a society whose methods of conspicuous consumption, and global connectivity create its own form of tyranny.
Elements of this work were developed for the Regenerate Project with Banbridge City Council. Thanks to Banbridge City Council and Dr Kevin McKenna for the projected use of his unpublished research on Francis Crozier.
