Anne Tallentire
In the 1980s Anne Tallentire made a series of works centering around experiences of dislocation, posing questions around who speaks and what is the nature of this speaking. At this time Tallentire often worked with performance strategies, developed not only through installation but also by the use of the camera—as an instigator of activity and also a recorder of a partial view; bringing the idea of the fragmented subject position to the fore.
At the core of Tallentire’s work is a refusal to harness easily available visual language, instead in works such as the film The Gap of Two Birds (1989), the identification of the subject’s position in relation to the object (in this case Maumeen Pass, Connemara) remains obscured. Typical of Tallentire’s work is also an unwillingness to hold on to a finished form, works are re-presented and recycled—elements and fragments come in and out of view. From Instances (1999), initially a three-part work consisting of a video projection, a video/performance cycle shot with a hand held camera and a video loop of a single image-performance action is presented here. The artist is brought into the frame, her body evidenced, listening—a sensory evocation is produced. The production of this …
In the 1980s Anne Tallentire made a series of works centering around experiences of dislocation, posing questions around who speaks and what is the nature of this speaking. At this time Tallentire often worked with performance strategies, developed not only through installation but also by the use of the camera—as an instigator of activity and also a recorder of a partial view; bringing the idea of the fragmented subject position to the fore.
At the core of Tallentire’s work is a refusal to harness easily available visual language, instead in works such as the film The Gap of Two Birds (1989), the identification of the subject’s position in relation to the object (in this case Maumeen Pass, Connemara) remains obscured. Typical of Tallentire’s work is also an unwillingness to hold on to a finished form, works are re-presented and recycled—elements and fragments come in and out of view. From Instances (1999), initially a three-part work consisting of a video projection, a video/performance cycle shot with a hand held camera and a video loop of a single image-performance action is presented here. The artist is brought into the frame, her body evidenced, listening—a sensory evocation is produced. The production of this counter sensorium to the visual provides us with an inverse of how and what we witness and how testimony may or may not find form.
Tallentire has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions to date, including The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. In 1999 she represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. Her 1999 monograph Anne Tallentire, featuring essays by Jean Fisher, John Seth and Sabina Sharkey was published by Project Press Dublin. Tallentire was a Professor of Fine Art at Central Saint Martins where she taught and inspired generations of artists from the early 1990s to 2014.
Courtesy of Hollybush Gardens