Artist Profile
BERN ROCHE FARRELLY
Consisting of a pair separate video works, ‘Black Blank’, and ‘Colour Color’; ‘Croma Coma’, was conceived as a neutral space, a void were the experience of null (no/lack of light) overwrites the materiality of the body and the ever presence of linguistic thought. Blank Black, a television that switches arhythmically between the inert grey of an unpowered screen and the glowing dark of broadcast black sits across from ‘Colour Color’. In turn, this second video shows the cycloptic (Cyclops like/the single round) window of a classical façade as it floods with a hallucinogenic swirl of light emanating from an unseen source. The building’s eye is attempting to construct a code from the dumb binary flickering of the empty screen across from it. The foreboding physicality of the stone building is in stark contrast to the playful colors that flood its surface. Its classical proportions and symmetries embody the long tradition of rationalist aesthetics and morality that is now the site for the exchange of unreadable gestures of pure light, echoing the narcotic experience of television emersion. If, as Jerry Garcia postulated, “cyberspace is where you are when you are on the telephone”, then in a similar way the television experience is one that separates the consciousness from the body. The work leaves the viewer caught in a disembodied reverie between the measure and weight of the material world and the incomprehensible cosmos of light. Bern Roche Farrelly, born 1979, graduated from the Dublin Institute of Technology in 2002 with a First Class honours in Fine Art before moving to London to do his MA in the Chelsea Collage of Art. Since graduating he has he has practiced as an artist, curator and performer throughout Europe, showing at the Cork Art Festival in Ireland and in a fringe show at the Athens Biennale. Publications include: OMSK book and “Love Love” Magazine. In the last year he has had two solo exhibitions in London, entitled “Appendicitis” and ‘Read “Read”.’
www.bernrochefarrelly.com
