Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Something New Under the Sun is the first narrative film by artist Gavin Murphy, and was the result of exhaustive research carried out over a 3-year period. It takes as its subject the IMCO building (a demolished modernist factory) and the lost work of its chief designer Oliver P. Bernard. The IMCO building was during its brief existence, a major landmark on Dublin’s south coast, yet it is all but forgotten today, and entirely undocumented. Similarly much of Bernard’s work has been demolished or replaced. In the film, anachronic image sequences are interleaved with intertextual narration, drawn from a multitude of sources, viewpoints and timeframes: Bernard’s life and work (including his dramatic survival of the sinking of the Luisitania in 1915); IMCO’s owners and various phases of the building and its demolition; the discovery of dry-cleaning; and the words of Henri de Saint-Simon, Blaise Pascal, and American author Lewis Mumford on time and the notion of ‘being out of date’. The film notes the parallel fates of the building’s architecture and the dry-cleaning machinery it housed – becoming technologically and stylistically obsolete – and the symbolic necessity of razing the present to make way for the future.

Gavin Murphy is a Dublin-based artist and curator. His research-based practice encompasses assemblage, writing, still photography and moving image, with an interest in the sculptural possibilities of cinematic structures and mise en scène. Murphy’s work has been exhibited in Irish Museum of Modern Art (Project Space), 2014; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2014; BOZAR, Center for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2013; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 2012; Conical, Melbourne, 2009; and Colony, Birmingham, 2007. A monograph/research study, On Seeing Only Totally New Things, was published in 2013. His recent exhibition for the Sleepwalkers series at Dublin City Gallery is to be featured in an accompanying book published by Ridinghouse UK, to include texts by Chantal Mouffe, and Simon Critchley. He is the recipient of various Arts Council awards, and residencies at Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; and he is co-director/curator of the artist-run space, Pallas Projects/Studios. Curated projects include the first solo exhibition of the British artist/filmmaker John Smith in Ireland (The world seems a long way away, Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2011); and he was co-curator/producer of Darklight Compendium Vol. 1– the first Irish-produced DVD collection of experimental shorts, animation and artists’ film (2007).