Very happy to have some work included in this exhibition curated by Dermot Browne the exhibition Travels in Hyper Reality, and brings together the works of eight Visual Artists around the ideas of travel, altered realities, and a range of making practices including collage, weaving, painting, photography and print.

The featured artists are Gavin Hogg, Helen Cantwell, Johnny Bugler, Izabela Szczutkowska, Helen O’Shea, Enda O’Donoghue, Andrew Carroll, and Tom Doig.

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The title of the show comes from a book and essay published by Umberto Eco in 1975, which throws up ambiguous warnings of the threats of the then still new technology of Holography suggesting that it “satisfies the most ambitious ambitions of photorealism”.

Art, and image making in general, have always had uneasy relationships with their counterparts issuing from the world of technology, and here we are, at the dawn of (if you believe it), a new revolution in image making and creativity, this time led by A.I.

The “Hyper Reality” that these artists lead us into instead is one of embodied practices, mediated through chosen materials and engaged time. From Izabela Szczutkowska’s collaged photographic representations of her two homes; (Poland and Ireland), and the recurrent themes of palm trees and beach-like spaces in Johnny Bugler’s works, the sorts of travel that only art can allow are strong here.

The type of multi-layered “Hyper Reality” that we each carry around with us in our mobile devices is suggested in Gavin Hogg’s two monumental wall pieces. Visual language is in overload here and we must travel with it or lose ourselves.

As some of us will remember when C.D’s were still a new thing, the “death of vinyl records” was announced triumphantly, yet who could have predicted that artists and musicians would then go and play two records together? And with each of the artists represented here, you will find that uniquely human ability to bring two (or more) diverse elements together to create a new reality, a new window into our selves.

Where images and made objects meet well conceived ideas and processes, a space is born for us to travel in.

Crane Visual is a Visual Arts and Interdisciplinary Social Space curated and managed by Dermot Browne and located in the Musgrave Theatre at Dance Cork Firkin Crane.