Everything Changes, Nothing Perishes
Aideen Barry
Galeria Isabel Hurley
Malaga, ESP
May 6th to June 9th 2019
This Exhibition was graciously funded by Culture Ireland 2019
The world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them
Oscar Wilde
Omnia mutantur, nihil interit, verse from Ovid's Metamorphose, is a metaphoric image of immortality, not referred here to the enjoyment of youth or eternal life but to the continuity of spirit, in some way. With a historical approach, it could be applied to our unavoidable predisposition to repeat over and over again mistakes and nonsenses from the past; Furthermore, to extrapolate to the boom of ultra conservative ideologies in the political body and the everyday sphere, and to our own failures and incapacity to prevent disaster, what becomes in a kind of vicious cycle, condemned to repetition ad infinitum, like Sisyphus. Thomas Hobbes, in his mechanistic thinking frame, considers that man is a type of machine, enunciating the concept of political body, in relationship with the Estate, as a result of a political power acceptance deal on the part of those natural machines that are humans, who are situated in an intermediate position between that body and robots. Any existence is also armed with movement; Being that movement the effect or cause of others, it is the final responsible for all reality. In the same way, it is human motor force what enables mutual coordination and feedback between the cognitive, the imaginative and conceptual, from which the “mechanical” subject can produce and reproduce images and, through them, build or rebuild the world. Aideen Barry is attracted by this mechanistic notion of the bodies in their creative practise. Also, deepen in the fascination about what is normal and what extraordinary in daily life; how anxiety, humour, horror, banality and boredom converged in daily routine, with their repeated chores ad nauseam. Even more, it creates its connection with the absurdity of endless repetition and lack of sense of tasks, useless very often, of acts and behaviours. All these automatic gestures, within a sterile, anodyne and alienating routine, integral part of contemporaneity, whose best image is, paradoxically, the myth of Sisyphus. In these terms, our daily life reduced to a total absurd results hard of explain. However, Albert Camus, based on Greek mythology, in the Myth of Sysiphus states that is certainly the absurd what holds the hope for the future, since neither the reason nor the science can reveal the truth of Universe. To assume this statement implies accepting contradiction between reason and desire, and the following understanding of the world and its truths, which are not necessarily true. The third chapter of this philosophical essay, alludes to art and creation as the media to scape from the absurdity of existence.
