Photographic artist Amy O'Riordan has returned from New York laden with fresh vision, writes Aidan Dunne, Art Critic
One of Amy O'Riordan's earliest exhibited photographs was a self-portrait, camera in hand, against a background of holiday apartments and a brilliant blue sky. It is a typically poised, stylish image, even though it looks as if it might have come about casually, by chance. O'Riordan visits Marbella every year, and took the photograph there. In fact, she figured out the composition one year and took the photograph when she returned the next, to stay in the same apartment. These qualities, of a slow-burning visual imagination, exceptional attention to detail and sheer flair for an image characterise everything she's done since, including her latest group of photographs, Fantasia in NYC.
There are six Fantasia photographs on view in her current show at the Limerick City Gallery of Art. All are self-portraits and in each, garishly attired, she is pictured in the midst of a setting of almost parodic excess, a location that in one way or another promises the satisfaction of consumerist desire. There she is on the carousel in Central Park, in Dylan's psychedelic candy bar, and outside FAO Schwarz, the world-famous toy emporium, in the arms of a giant teddy bear.
Her own highly decorated presence in such surroundings is ambiguous, suggesting, on the one hand, subordination to pervasive commodification but also, in her cool gaze, a knowing detachment. This ambiguity is familiar from her staged images of young women, several of which are included in the exhibition. Any temptation to see the subjects of these pictures as objectified fashion victims is offset by their evident confidence and their amused autonomy. Rather than being slaves to an imposed identity, they play with and explore identities.
O'Riordan went to New York earlier this year on the strength of the Elizabeth Fitzpatrick Bursary, which she was awarded by the RHA in 2003. "She wanted to research galleries, but prior to going to New York, it occurred to her that she could also make work while she was there. She spent a lot of time on the Internet. "I was able to identify all the locations I wanted to use. It meant when I arrived I knew exactly what I was doing, I had a strategic purpose."
By then, as well, something else had happened. "I was looking at the idea of the fantasia, reading about the role of the female in the fantasia theme. What happens is that she becomes a woman-child, recreating that sense of wonder and novelty you experience as a child. So, to begin with I had this theme of the Alice in Wonderland figure in New York, and that shaped the body of work and the nature of the imagery."
She loved the city. "I'd always wanted to go. I'd grown up with so many of the cultural references, they'd fed into my work, and then there are programmes like Sex and the City. But even so, I was blown away. It's surreal. People had warned me that New Yorkers can be unfriendly, but they were incredibly accommodating. They were quite okay about appearing in the background of photographs, they were curious about what I was doing, but the response was like, well, sure, why not? There's this sense of anything goes, that you should be what you want to be. It's extraordinarily voyeuristic, a place where everyone is constantly watching and being watched, and I like that."
She carried everything in a rucksack and set up each shot carefully, using a tripod and a time-delayed exposure. "I had each costume worked out." On one occasion, Noah Wylie, who plays Dr Carter in ER, was passing with his baby and stopped to chat. "It was a New York moment," she recalls. "I love ER and you know there's this phenomenon that you think you know the characters you watch on television. So I felt oddly that I knew him and it seemed natural to be talking to him."
Prior to this work one of O'Riordan's most arresting photographs is of herself seated on a fairground carousel in Marbella. There are two new carousel images from New York. "I was keen to use the one in Central Park because that's where Holden Caulfield meets his sister in Catcher in the Rye." Carousels appeal to her because they are, usually, incredibly ornate but they also symbolically charged, standing for life, fate, the endless circularity of experience. In fact she wants to develop the carousel theme further. "I'd love to photograph carousels all over the world."
While in the US, she managed to see a huge number of exhibitions. "I relished the opportunity. It's important to be able to assess yourself in a global context. You just have to do it. In every respect the whole experience refreshed me. It's made me keen to travel more, and given me so many ideas I want to go back."
Fantasia in NYC and recent work by Amy O'Riordan is at the Limerick City Gallery of Art until August 27th. Tel: 061-310633 www.limerickcity.ie