Exhibitions

Name Calling Chinchilla, 2007
Lambdachrome print 100 x 150cm. Artist - Karl Grimes.

DIGNIFIED KINGS PLAY CHESS ON FINE GREEN SILK

Exhibitions by Karl Grimes     

September 27 to November 4, 2007

The Natural History Museum in a unique collaboration with the Gallery of Photography, Dublin, will jointly present, Dignified Kings Play Chess On Fine Green Silk, a body of new work by artist Karl Grimes.

Based on his year-long term as artist-in-residence at the Natural History Museum, this work encompasses themes of memory, taxonomy, curatorship and display. The museum as a repository of knowledge, historical regimes of representation and ways of seeing are here addressed as Grimes applies his lens to the collections and archives of the Museum as it celebrates its 150th anniversary.

R.M.Barrington's pioneering study of migratory birds around the Irish coastline is pivotal to the project. A central figure in Irish science history, he is here realised in sound and image. Taking his "Migration of Birds as Observed at Irish Lighthouses and Lightships", published in 1900, as a starting point, the archive of birds becomes transformed into a series of 'strange and charmed' billets-doux. The museum’s extensive collections are reconfigured through light and dark to present and renew those animals so beloved of generations of Irish people. The exhibition will run concurrently at the National Museum, Kildare Street and at the Gallery of Photography, Temple Bar.

A special, limited-edition publication with texts by Martin Kemp, Stephanie McBride, Nigel Monaghan and David Norris, accompanies the exhibitions.

For further information about Karls’s work, please visit: www.karlgrimes.net

Gallery of Photography is open: Tuesday - Saturday 11am-6pm and on Sunday from 1pm-6pm

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