See Line Gallery presents Blizzard Heatwave. In his online exhibition Irish artist Eamon O’Kane shows a new series of painted animations, which explore humankind’s relationship with nature. Using modernist architecture O’Kane sets it against a changing environment and suggests the transience of the manmade in relation to the cycles of nature. For each animation there is a corresponding oil painting.
As art critic Jacqui McIntosh has said, “O’Kane’s paintings suggest that architecture will fail us, that the fantasy is just that, and what’s more, the reality may do us more harm than good.”
In the animation Rising Tide, after Frank Gehry’s house (Nirvana and Mahler Remix), O’Kane presents an image of Gehry’s house slowly being submerged in layers of paint until it is completely obscured and then returning to the original image. A soundtrack of mixed excerpts from Nirvana’s album Nevermind and Mahler’s 5th Symphony accompany the animation. In Blizzard Heatwave, after Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann house (Snow Patrol and Mozart remix), the Neutra building is seen on a tranquil hot summer day only to be engulfed by an extreme snowstorm which obliterates the image and then loops back. O’Kane’s animation Seasonal overload, after The Eame’s house (Love and Vivaldi remix) presents the seminal building slowly being overtaken by a psychedelic mix of growth and decay from all the seasons.
O’Kane recognizes the dichotomy in his own paintings where he seems to offer the possibilities of hope, optimism and redemption with one hand while snatching them away with the other through his surreal, foreboding, and threatening allusions. For O’Kane, a home is not just a home, and green rolling hills are not just green rolling hills — they become symbols of a precarious scenario where utopia apparently is within reach but actually is on the verge of being obliterated by a disturbing presence that seems to be lurking just beneath the surface.
Eamon O’Kane is a multi-media artist from Ireland who has exhibited widely and is the recipient of many awards and scholarships including the Taylor Art Award, The Tony O’Malley Award and a Fulbright Award. He has shown in exhibitions curated by Dan Cameron, Lynne Cooke, Klaus Ottman, Salah M. Hassan, Jeremy Millar, Mike Fitzpatrick, Sarah Pierce, Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn, Angelika Nollert, Yilmaz Dziewior and Apinan Poshyananda. He has taken part in EV+A, Limerick, Ireland, seven times including 2005 when he received an EV+A open award from Dan Cameron. In 2006 he was short-listed for the AIB Prize and received a Pollock Krasner foundation grant. O’Kane has had over forty solo exhibitions including shows in Berlin, Frankfurt, Dublin, Zurich, New York, London and Copenhagen. He was short-listed for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in London in 2007. His artwork is in numerous public and private collections worldwide. O’Kane lives and works in Odense, Denmark and Co. Donegal, Ireland and is currently Visiting Research Fellow in Fine Art at UWE in Bristol, UK.
