Voyager

06 March 2008 - 29 March 2008 at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery




Kevin Kavanagh is pleased to present Voyager, an exhibition of new photographs by Michael Boran.
Michael Boran’s new series of works take us on a zig zag journey across a geography that seems as much about the inner space of the imagination as the locations they describe. Locations are populated by restless characters searching and probing their environment for clues as to current position and direction in a shifting world. The title alludes to the NASA Space probe and draws attention to some of it’s shared sensibilities of method in the use of time lapse, digital photo compositing, aerial views and remote camera triggering. Shot in a variety of locations including Budapest, Toulouse and Dublin the show finds a particular landmark in an image entitled Cite de l’Espace- Toulouse:

“At once subtle and surreal, this image reminds us of our capacity for imaginative projection and self-deception as we attempt to situate ourselves in time and space, as we idly ponder where we have come from, where we are going, where we might have gone, and where we might be just now.”

Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 2008

A Catalogue with an essay by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith has been published to accompany the exhibition. For further information please contact the gallery
Title. Michael Boran - Voyager
ISBN : 978-0-9555164-6-7




GOING BACK 10 years or more, Michael Boran used to construct toy-sized vignettes, using plastic figurines and other props and, by photographing the scenes he created, recast them as "real". More recently, he's been photographing the real world in ways that suggest it's not as real as we might think. In Voyager , at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, he offers us images of people in transit or momentarily adrift, more often than not photographed from a height, so that they are foreshortened against expanses of ground that seem to contain and envelop them.

Because they are paved or, in at least one case, painted with traffic markings, the backgrounds have a grid-like character, and it is as though Boran, from a position of omniscience, is manoeuvring chess pieces on a board. The idea of orientation comes up several times - they may occupy positions on a grid, but some of the people in the photographs seem unduly preoccupied with establishing just where they are. Others have the appearance of being aimless onlookers, tourists unsure of just what it is they are supposed to find interesting.

Boran likes playing on the flatness of the background, which becomes in his hands a picture plane. He is a little too fond of using a double-exposure effect, whereby the figures become ghostly, semi-transparent presences, but he is generally judicious about employing digital manipulation to achieve his effects. Enter the labyrinthine game of flatness and depth, reality and illusion that he has constructed, and you're soon convinced that he has a real visual intelligence.

AIDAN DUNNE
Irish Times Wednesday, March 26, 2008





Voyagers

In the world as selectively presented to us by Michael Boran, perspectives are usually skewed, grids tend to break down, and maps are often perplexing or useless. Patterns, and even presences, are unstable. The most advanced technological apparatus as well as the most basic visual clues by which we might hope to take the measure of our surroundings and orient ourselves within them, are presented as deceptive. In Satellite (5 Hours) Dublin a bright white satellite dish photographed against a blue sky, though formally pleasing to the eye, seems otherwise unremarkable, until that eye notices that its concave bowl is striped with an impossible splay of conflicting shadows. People, when they appear in Boran’s photographs, are invariably adrift or astray. Sometimes they are barely there at all, their bodies glimpsed on the point of materialising in a particular location, as if they have been momentarily transported there from another time and place. In Crossroads, Dublin a woman with a handbag slung over her shoulder and a man with a mobile phone held to his ear huddle together as they pore over a map. They are standing on a patch of badly cracked asphalt in the middle of the fading yellow criss-cross pattern of a painted parking-lot or traffic box. They are clearly in need of directions, if not in danger of being run over, were it not for the fact that they are almost immaterial. The lines of the roughly painted grid and the disintegrating asphalt alike are clearly visible through the shades that are their bodies, an artefact of time-lapse photography. In At the Museum, Budapest two cultural tourists stand a little apart from one another on a geometrically patterned black and light-grey floor. They may be travelling together, but probably not. One gazes away into the middle distance while the other stares quizzically into the mouth of a large decorative stone urn on a low plinth. They appear to be mildly disoriented, a fact accentuated by the position from which the photograph has been taken. As in Crossroads, Dublin, this would seem to be about thirty feet above them. This is in fact the case, given that Boran has, for some years now, been favouring shots taken with a camera mounted on a flexible thirty-foot pole, which produces such bird’s-eye views. But there is something else out of kilter. The optical assault of the checkerboard floor, especially from this vantage point, is even more aggressive and frontal than we might expect. It is as if the floor has been tilted up toward the viewer and now occupies a different visual plane than that occupied by the figures. The perspectival distortion of the regular grid, for which the naked eye would ordinarily account automatically, has evidently been eliminated through a process of digital manipulation. The patterned floor confronts the viewer like a geometrically abstract painting on a wall, into which the other pictorial elements, the figures and urn, are alien intrusions.

Such distortions and disorientations provide the technical and thematic matrix from which the ten mid-size lambdachrome prints that make up Boran’s most recent suite of photographs, Voyager, all 2007, have emerged. These images are as disparate in subject matter as they are in location. If the suite’s title calls to mind the long-term investigations of our solar system’s final frontier on the journey into interstellar space, Boran’s explorations are more earth-bound, in spite of the bird’s-eye views. They are nevertheless similarly wide-ranging, while retaining a comparable sense of focus. Boran’s Voyager takes the viewer on a zig-zagging trip from Birmingham to Budapest, from Dublin to Toulouse to Lake Garda, and from the South of Sweden to that country’s frozen North. Despite the uniform dimensions of the prints, and the recurrence of certain key tropes, the subject matter and compositional make-up of the images are quite varied and the dramatis personae constantly changing. This is no orderly pictorial account of a predetermined Grand Tour, but a succession of snapshots of apparently randomly chosen locations in which the artist has found just the kind of thing he was looking for, before moving on. Though order is clearly of interest, it is not imposed. Or rather, when it is imposed on the image it is done so in a manner that stresses just what an imposition this is. Visitors to the Summit, Monte Baldo offers a view of a spectacular Italian landscape from a vantage point officially predesignated to maximize touristic delectation, replete with a wooden safety barrier and bench. We see the ghostly figures of three separate couples, who are looking away from us. Two of the couples are admiring and calibrating the view we partly share with them. One standing figure seems to be photographing the panorama, while a seated figure holds a camera in her outstretched hand in order to photograph herself and her partner surveying the same landscape. The third couple is examining a printed map of a mountain range on a quaintly rustic wooden display stand. From the specific vantage point of the photographer, and implied viewer, the map appears to be oddly continuous in its contours with the view beyond it. This, however, is surely misleading and merely the result of a carefully chosen camera position. These three couples probably never coincided at this particular location. Their ethereal afterimages were simply stitched together digitally for compositional purposes by the artist, who has yet again opted to make this potential deception clearly evident to the viewer.
Boran has little truck with the map’s implicit aspiration toward objectivity and supreme utility. We conventionally assume that a map is true and useful regardless of where we are coming from. Yet we know from various cartographic controversies that this is not necessarily the case. Take, for instance, the debate concerning the misleading nature of the standard Mercator map of the world, which greatly exaggerates the relative size of areas far from the equator, thereby significantly compromising our perception of the vastness of the continent of Africa and arguably pandering to a Eurocentric world view. The various alternatives proposed over the years include versions in which the mapped world, as we have come to know it, is viewed ‘upside-down’ in a manner as disorienting as the view offered in Boran’s North, Ostersund of the reflections of three well-clad Arctic divers staring into a triangular hole cut into the ice. One of them grips a rope that disappears into the water. One can imagine them fancifully dreaming of the day when one their colleagues might actually plunge through to the other side of the globe. The potential for distortion that is inherent in any attempt at ostensibly definitive cartography, since the dawning of the age of science, is also thematised in The Golden Boys, Birmingham, a photograph of a city-centre statue in which three eighteenth-century members of that city’s lunar society are shown theatrically scrutinising a map. A bird perches on the golden head of one of the figures, comically subverting his monumental authority, while the distorted reflection of a city centre high-rise shimmers in the gridded glass curtain wall of the building behind the statue. A similarly comic subversion of authority is evident in Our Glorious Leader, Budapest in which all that remains of a once ostentatious statue of Joseph Stalin is his boots.
In The Stop, Toulouse a blonde woman in white trousers and a patterned summer blouse, viewed once again from above, is waiting for a bus. The pattern of the small bricks in the street contrasts with that of the stone slabs of the pavement. She is looking to the right. Her torqued body suggests that she is about to step into the street. Maybe her bus is arriving. Maybe she has simply given up waiting and is about to set off in another direction. In Walker, Skane Province a man in a check-patterened short-sleeve shirt walks across a cobbled plaza. Moss and flowering plants sprout up through cracks in the time-worn grid. He is holding a folded piece of paper in his hand. If these are directions toward his intended destination, or a list of things to do there, he has currently no need to consult them. Or perhaps he no longer cares where he is going, having given in to the temptation to drift aimlessly. The oddest of all the images that make up the Voyager suite, however, is Cité de l’Espace, Toulouse. Shot at a visitors’ space centre in Southern France, it is an image of a generic modernist, concrete walkway threading through landscaped surroundings, with an area of well-maintained pebbledash paving in the foregound. Propped up on the paving is a panel on which there is a life-size, painted depiction of three figures in astronaut suits marching across a stretch of tarmac. Their relative proportions suggest those of an improbable space-age family. The holes in the panel where their faces should be are clearly designed to allow visitors to photograph themselves as space explorers, in the time-honoured manner of the pier-end holiday snaps of an earlier age. At once subtle and surreal, this image reminds us of our capacity for imaginative projection and self-deception as we attempt to situate ourselves in time and space, as we idly ponder where we have come from, where we are going, where we might have gone, and where we might be just now.
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, January 2008.

The Bank

comissioned by The Central Bank of Ireland
Michael Boran, Michael Durand and David Farrell at Gallery of Photography Dublin


Michael Boran's work focuses on the Plaza and steps. It reveals the secret poetry of fleeting moments captured as people go about their everyday business. A man looking in his wallet shows the keepsake snapshot inside. People entering and leaving the building make bold patterns against the steps, playfully mirroring the graphing of economic ascent and descent. Upstairs, an office worker glances away from her computer against a panoramic vista of the city's changing skyline.





for more images http://flickr.com/photos/78774491@N00/sets/72157594323274260/

The Sun Propeller

"Roundabout" lambdachrome print 90x70cm. 2005.

Michael Boran’s new series of photographs trace the path of an energy as it spins from the earth. The Sun Propeller is the engine of change and is seen in glimpses of phenomena from the edge of our peripheral vision. The sun moves a shadow of a table across a courtyard while a backpacker compares his position on a map against a cityscape of co-ordinates. Boran’s familiar themes of micro and macro cosmos are extended into the eternal and the now of photography. The spirals of Newgrange are found in the road markings of a roundabout, the Way is clear.

Utilising a wide range of techniques from time lapse, aerial photography and digital image enhancement the photographs reveal and revel in the actual, in a manner which references both the rigors of scientific photography and the evidence for “The Unexplained’.



ART CHOICE
The Sun Propeller investigates the interplay of time and space in a sculptural manner, the series of photographs tracing the movement of the earth by focusing on shadows cast by the sun, on the positions of people and on circular shapes in the built environment. Michael Boran has developed in this direction from earlier work that featured models, cutouts and assemblage, using a wide range of techniques — from aerial photography, time lapse and digital enhancement — to produce unexpected effects, for example in Here and Now. Three Hours combines three shadows in one image, transforming a mundane plastic table into a sundial. Although playful, these works probe the relativism of perception, both in their unusual approach to the urban landscape and in their obvious relish in the technical manipulation of images.

Catherine Leen
The Sunday Times
October 16, 2005

Grasping the Sparrow's Tail

for more images . . . https://www.flickr.com/photos/22513067@N04/sets/72157650953982607/

Vacant Spaces, Ghostly Traces, Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times March 2003
Michael Boran’s Grasping the Sparrow’s Tail is an exhibition of photographs that explore the fleeting interactions between people and places in terms of momentary alignments and fugitive traces. That might sound a bit vague, and it is actually difficult to articulate what it is precisely that Boran does with his images, but they do have a beautifully light, magical touch and are clearly the products of a real visual intelligence.
In one sequence, people are distributed across a paved square in Seville like pieces on a chessboard. In Echo, it is as if stone steps remember the footsteps of someone descending. Footprints features an amazing conglomeration of criss-crossing, overlaping prints. Ladder is an extraordinary study of the excavated interior of a building, and it is a great photograph. All these images have in common a preoccupation with surface and marks. There are layers upon layers of both. Throughout, there is a real sense of Boran closing in on something, searching for an image.

Peak

IRISH TIMES 7/03/01

Visual Art/Aidan Dunne

Michael Boran is a consistently interesting photographic artist who has

never settled complacently into one stylistic niche. Peak, at the Kevin

Kavanagh Gallery, is a particularly good, accomplished show. The title

refers to the idea of a commanding point of view, literally and

figuratively, from where the eye can explore and edit the landscape at

will. Boran treats the notion wittily, with a study, for example, of

what looks like a heap of building sand, symmetrically positioned

between the imposing stone walls of a building that has been allowed

fall into dilapidation: the old making way for the new. The peak here -

the apex of sand - might be the lofty height of arrogant development,

and the overall image is more than the sum of its parts.

Another photograph, of a stack of logs, numerals neatly scored onto

their ends, presumably intended as markers for a nature trail but

currently piled in random disorder, nicely undercuts the conceit of

packaging and ordering the landscape for recreation. If all this sounds

a bit didactic, it is not really so, and the major part of the

exhibition is not at all so, consisting as it does of beautiful studies

of landscape details in Spain (with just the occasional piece of sleight

of hand, as with one repeated, inverted image). The dried-out terrain,

orderly terraces and neat planting makes for meditations on culture and

nature in an unforced, easygoing way. But a real love of the landscape

also comes through. In most of the images, Boran knocks off the sharp

edges we associate with photography, so that the surfaces have a soft,

textural continuity that is, for want of a better word, painterly.

The Palace of Bubbles

Watch a feature on the exhibition on  The View, RTE Arts programme, an introduction by the artist followed by a panel discussion.

The Palace of Bubbles

Michael Boran’s extraordinary new work is all about bubbles . On entering the main chamber of his Palace of Bubbles protean associations bubble up: cell biology , space probes , Moorish architecture, the world economy,70s retro, worker bees, the boy in the bubble, afterimages, innocence, moments of epiphany, memory, the passing of time ……..
In the practice of meditation, thoughts are regarded as a flow of bubbles, rising into consciousness. And there is certainly a meditative quality to the Palace, the images , being free of fixed co-ordinates mean that we could be looking from either end of a telescope – at a single electron, or the expanding cosmos. Or through a time bubble, we could be witnessing the creation of Life itself as it emerged with a plop from the primal soup, billions of years ago .
At times awesomely beautiful, at others even slightly menacing, Boran’s bubbles set us off on a series of journeys into the architecture of imagery. We could start with the bubble images made from melted photographic film. Here, the film itself, usually eclipsed by the imprint of ‘content’ is revealed as a veil, a lattice of bubbles. We embark on a microscopic voyage into the film, into the beautiful madness of pure pattern and design that underpins all representation. You get the sense that those patterns, also presented in a series of ‘blueprints’ are the abstracted designs upon which Nature regenerates itself.
Throughout the work there is a playful insistence on exploring the blindspots of western perspective representation. In the outdoor projection piece, the fixity of the ‘eye’ in the perspective model is taken to extremes – with humourous consequences. Or, in pop mode, Bubble Projectile throws us into the photon chaos inside a giant eye. Or again, more lyrically, in the Exploded Projector installation we can dwell in the upside-down memory world of the glass globe/lens; we can see the inside of a light bulb, another bubble of sorts.
In their promiscuous masquerade bubbles confound the positive certainties of the perspective system, de-coupling the conjoined orders of perception and representation. Poised at the close of the photographic century, Michael Boran’s new work opens up a space between the burden of representation and the dizzying freedom of pure pattern.
Washing up will never be the same.

Tanya Kiang, Gallery of Photography. Dublin 1999




Reviews


Against a warm red background, they look like a swarm of bees. Elsewhere we see them cling together in honeycomb structures. Isolated under a microscope lens the translucent purity and rotundity appears fixed and permanent, at odds with the ephemeral, fleeting nothingness we know a bubble to be. In his first solo show since 1994, Michael Boran presents bubbles in all their infinite variety. For the central installation, the wals of the main gallery are taken up with a stunning array of 66 prints. When scrutinised seperately it is clear each has been given its own identity, named for its characteristics and associations, from Cornea to Nebula and [more humorously]Mild Green Fairy. With the aid of a slide projector, Boran extends the visual experience into the realm of 3D. Bubble Projectile is beautifully effective as an installation: light projected onto a rotating mirror ball throws a myriad of light squares onto the walls, their whirling movement contrasted with a static eye. The effect is like stepping into the ungraspable interior of a bubble. The whimsical origins of Boran's subject and the surface beauty of its depiction belie the complexity of his interests in perception, illusion, transience and the potential of the photographic lens: even later, when the bubble has burst, the slight splatter of this show's magic remains.



Marian Lovett . The Sunday Times . 14/02/99





For visual desert, you couldn't do much better than Michael Boran's delightful 'Palace of Bubbles'. This photographic experience is one of joy and lightness - as the title suggests, Boran has been inspired by bubbles of different kinds. He experiments with light, documenting the capricious dances that bubbles will weave when disturbed, the changes in texture and pattern, etc.
The show consists of over 60 colour prints, initially baffling and resembling a possible multitude of things. The surprising geometric tendancy in bubble group formation connotes the honey chambers in a beehive; the floating of a solitary bubble with maybe a tiny group of baby-bubbles clinging to its skin is reminiscent of a cell under a microscope.
The fabulous beauty and apparent frivolity of the bubble pictures almost seems to have a subtext of menace. Clusters of round bubbles in a picture frame could be frogspawn, tapioca, the eggs of a poisonous insect - and, of course, they are a powerful metaphor for evanescence. Delicate and fragile, they could pop at any time. Some of the bubble images are made from melted photographic film, creating mad, mesmerising patterns within the destruction of the film's potential to contain real and recognisable images.
Boran also manages to present a challenge to his chosen medium. He confounds any expectations of 'traditional' photography, choosing instead to baffle, to provide the eye with something to decipher as well as to savour.
The 'Palace of Bubbles' also includes installations - one shows the inside of a lightbulb, a glass 'bubble' whose functionality veils its beauty. My favourite was the 'Bubble Projectile', a room upstairs which reconstructs the dizzying experience of being inside a huge eye. A golden toned melted bubble - the absence of a bubble - is projected onto the far wall, and a glittery mirror-ball hangs suspended in front of it. If you push the mirror-ball, thousands of tiny points of light fly across the walls, ceiling and floor of the little room as the ball swings. Simply gorgeous.



Marianne Hartigan. Sunday Tribune .14/02/99

Video interview The Science Gallery 2009

Afterlife

40 Shades Exhibition Catalogue - The Crafts Council Exhibition Catalogue 2005

Works on Film

In conjunction with Cork Film Festival 1994          Triskel Arts Centre.

Boran’s latest series, Works on Film. Consists primarily of cibachrome prints from scratched, melted and/or broken negatives, and incorporates much layering of multiple exposures. With this building and layering of imagery and colour, the photographs contain a wonderfully sinister quality. Imaginary light seems to glow from behind the plain wood frames, drawing the viewer into a world of scratches and bubbles, awash with saturated colour. Certainly colour is the first thing noticed with this show, but beneath this, lurks sinister images reminiscent of childhood fears, daydreams and memories. There is violence and mystery, but playful fun as well. Michael Boran seems to be exploring the space of the film, and getting lost is both frightening and exciting. His playfulness is expressed in his manipulation of his medium, while mystery is expressed through the imagery.
The gallery at the Triskel suited the exhibition extraordinarily well. With its skylights spilling diffuse light through triangular cross beams, it was as intriguing as a long-bolted attic – without the dust and cobwebs. This was an atmosphere appropriate to the images, as if one had walked in and found something belonging to someone else, something both private and precious, some keys, and old ship. A few portraits.






Almost all of these photographs have been manipulated in some way at the level of the slide or negative itself. The multiple exposures create a faded, iridescent ghost image that seems to flutter across the print. The first image in the series, Untitled(Bounty) recalls a childish spirit of adventure, all wild and reckless. A phantom ship glowing yellow and ochre, bursts full sail out of a damp blue. A very brave and romantic beginning; this ship is a forerunner of what is to come, dragging other stories and images out of the mist in its wake. And these stories and images are wildly varied, as if conjuring up extremely different dreams, yet all from the same mind.
Film Leader 1, 2 and 3 are images that could be nightmares, Red, black and yellow saturated abstracts melt and bubble together much like oozing and splitting amoebas. They are basic and raw. Film Leader 3 has an almost ancient symbolism, roughly the shape of a worn cross or a vaguely female form, as depicted in Sheela-na-gigs.
The three Film Leader images are the most wildly abstract: bursts of heat, energy, or emotion, whereas Rescue Notebook and Keys more closely resemble collage, but not one of cut and paste. These are collages of light and faded thoughts. The colour, tone and whole feel of both hearken back to some Pre_Raphaelite painting or Victorian diary, dreamy and seductive. In Rescue Notebook afaint image of a dog and some rope blend together with human figures in stone relief. A clear image of a school notebook stands out, taking up most of the right half of the space. Is this as simple as school. Study and the dog that followed you home? Are these mere childhood daydreams, hidden away in a forgotton box, found by a stranger? The images of dog and humans fade out of each other, giving the illusion of movement that is so striking in this exhibition. Movement of the eye, and movement of the mind as it trips over itself with so many almost forgotton thoughts.
The last image in the series, Keys, presents a box of old fashioned keys in the foreground. But this is no ordinary solid box of keys. It is as thin as air, whispering in, then back out of the overgrown wood background which could be a wall, a fence or a door, as in the novel The Secret Garden, where to find the one elusive key which would open all that is secret, is the basis of many a childish dream. This is a dream that for some continues into adulthood. It is interesting to conclude the exhibition with this image. Instead of the keys representing a closing or a locking, they are an opening to many things, a bounty which then leads back to the beginning.
On a second viewing, certain things become visually clearer, while yet more resistant to interpretation. Melt seems at first to be just that, a blob of melted film. Then a young girl’s hair can be discerned, tied back with a funny girlish hairband. It is her face that has become the yellow ochre swirl, full of tiny air bubbles. Obliteration and reconstruction of faces continues throughout the exhibition, particularly with Damaged Negative 1 and 2, where human eyes, nose and mouth have been scratched onto the negative. But lest this sound like a coroner’s report, the ‘damage’ does not arise from ruthless violence but more from a blurring of sense impressions. It requires the viewer to sift through the layers.
The image Teddy Bear is one of the exhibitions strongest. This photograph of a white, masked and consequentially very uncute teddy is extremely unnerving. Adding to this effect again are scratch marks scoring the figure’s body with jarring green and yellow tones. It has simultaneously an ‘in your face’ and sectetive, almost eerie, quality. This tension between the works accessibility – their open invitation to the viewer, and the secretive layers one then discovers – marks a sustained development from Boran’s previous Nature Morte show in the Temple Bar Gallery.


Ali Corcoran

Circa magazine Autumn 1994