Livepool Irish Festival
October 2022
Instagram guest spot 10-15 October
Exhibition 20-30 October
Liverpool Irish Festival
Since 2019, Art Arcadia and Liverpool Irish Festival have mapped exchanges between Liverpool and Derry.
This year’s participation to the Liverpool Irish Festival consists of two strands: The Daily Gag and A burnt out Dollhouse & The Oil Drop Kid
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The Daily Gag
Using the classical grammar of the joke: its framing, telling and punchline, in a roundabout sort of way (the ‘telling’ was created first, followed by the ‘punchline’, followed by the ‘framing’) Ciara Finnegan and Paola Bernardelli created a series of jokes which they will post daily. Bernardelli created and photographed the setups that form the tellings while Finnegan responded with photographic inventions to form the punchlines and cooked up the framing text.
The make up of a joke
Known as The Daily Gag this relay will take place on Liverpool Irish Festival’s Instagram account (www.instagram.com/LivIrishFest) and can be found and followed using the hashtag #LIF2022Housing
Following her participation in Housing – a remote residency at Art Arcadia – Ciara Finnegan (artist) invited Bernardelli (founder/programme manager Art Arcadia) to play with the hyperbolic sculptural figures in the transparent plexiglass dollhouse that Finnegan built in the exhibition space in Derry. See more on the exhibition origins here.
Play and references
Playing with the figures, the transparent structure of the house and the shift of light and point of view, Bernardelli staged (and photographed) a series of absurd scenarios. These setups serve as the ‘telling’ of a gag to which – drawing on Maggie Hennefeld’s** research on the physical comedy of early 20th century film comediennes – Finnegan and her 10-year-old daughter, provide a punchline.
As with her work on Housing within The Daily Gag sequence, Finnegan makes reference to Malcolm Turvey’s analysis of the comedy in the films of Jacques Tati and what he terms ‘comedic modernism’* and continues to poke at issues around transparency and privacy in the contemporary age.
In the way that Tati’s films stimulated audiences to be alert to the comic possibilities of everyday life, The Daily Gag seeks to invite the spectator to participate in co-authoring the humour. It also laughs at itself (self-consciously aware that it plays on some of the more abstruse behaviours of contemporary art) and audiences’ studious urge to ‘get’ contemporary art or, conversely, dismiss it quickly with “Yeah. I don’t get it”.
*Malcolm Turvey, Play Time Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2020)
**Maggie Hennefeld (2015) Miniature Women, acrobatic maids and self-amputating domestics: Comediennes of the trick film, Early Popular Visual Culture.
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A burnt out Dollhouse & The Oil Drop Kid
Liverpool based Artist David Jacques’ multilayered, narrative-driven work often chimes with Literary genres, such as Speculative fiction and by turn Magical Realism and Weird Fiction. An approach much in keeping with the storytelling activities in evidence here at The Readers’ home in the Mansion House.
His presentation is the result of a recent collaborative residency with Irish Artists Anne-Marie McKee and Ciara Finnegan for the Art Arcadia space in Derry, Ireland and subsequently the 2022 Liverpool Irish Festival. The residency was constructed around Ciara’s concept of developing a ‘nodal experimental art space’. Central to which is the template of an archetypal Dutch Dollhouse that is shared, assembled and affected through the interventions of the participating artists.
David’s project posits a surreal scenario whereby the Dollhouse has been exposed to some form of eco-nightmare. Oil pipes contort underground then penetrate through the burnt out structure, piercing the roof to spout a bulbous cloud of carbon. The shape of this violent intrusion is cast as almost arboreal. It acts as a delirious subversion of certain Fossil Fuel Company Logo’s; those that attempt to signify kinship with the Natural World.
In accompaniment are a series of studies relating to the Esso Gasoline ‘Happy Oil Drop Kid’. A mascot used to front their worldwide marketing campaigns during the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Diminutive in stature, the ‘Oil Drop Kid’ was realised as a mythical sprite-like character, with a permanently happy demeanour. However, the rendering of him here sees a partly resurrected, grotesque and malevolent puck-like figure, definitively up to no good. Ultimately, the studies operate somewhat like Medieval Marginalia in relation to the Dollhouse assemblage, whereby they realise as a satirical digression of sorts.
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This collaborative residency is in partnership with The Livepool Irish Festival and The Dollhouse Space. It is funded by Derry City & Strabane District Council, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Arts Council England, hosted by Art Arcadia in Derry and The Reader in Liverpool.
