FORBIDDEN FRUIT?‘Shrouded Spirits No 5’, by Betty Gannon.
Good Friday’s great cover-up exposed
Westport artist Betty Gannon takes a wry but insightful look at the phenomenon of the Good Friday ‘cover-up’ of alcohol in her new exhibition of photographs, ‘Shrouded Spirits’, opening in McGing’s Bar, Westport, on Holy Thursday, April 17, at 7.30pm.
Gannon’s images depict various Mayo emporia and their attempts to conceal their alcoholic products on Good Friday last year. The irony of exhibiting this show in a bar that will itself be closed on Good Friday in compliance with the Intoxicating Liquor Act of 1927 is not lost on the exhibition’s curator, fellow visual artist Ian Wieczorek.
“Betty spent last Good Friday documenting the ‘cover-up’, and the resulting images presented as a cohesive body of work. I couldn’t think of anywhere more appropriate than a bar in which to show it,” said Wieczorek.
The bar in question, McGing’s, is no stranger to visual art, and has housed a number of exhibitions over recent years. “It’s great to find a bar manager like Anthony Finnegan so open to showing contemporary art in McGing’s,” Wieczorek added. “Westport is lucky to have such an open-minded and staunch supporter of the visual arts in a non-formal venue, and we’re really grateful for his generous support for this show.”
Betty Gannon graduated from GMIT in 2008, and has exhibited widely throughout Ireland, as well as in Northern Ireland, Germany, Canada, USA and Italy. This will be her eighth solo show.
The exhibition catalogue asserts that Gannon’s informal photo-documentation of the covering up of alcohol on Good Friday ‘quietly exposes the contradictory tensions of consumerism and prohibition, the result of a historical collusion of Church and State that persists into the present day’.
While it is noted that the exhibition is characterised by ‘humour and lightness of touch’, it remains thought-provoking: “While the ‘forbidden’ alcoholic products are still physically present in the shops, on Good Friday they are rendered ‘inaccessible’ through a literal (though clearly transparent) makeshift physical concealment, an action that evokes a complicit air of mystery and secrecy. There is also an implication that the general public cannot – or should not – be trusted to comply with the Law if the alcoholic products remain in view.”
‘Shrouded Spirits’ will run in McGing’s, High Street, Westport, from this Thursday, April 17 to Sunday, April 27.
