Grace Weir
Essays
Published in 3 different nights, recurring, IMMA, Dublin, ISBN: 978-1-909792-15-9

Future Perfect (2015)

Victoria Evans

Future Perfect (2015) is series of twenty five works made with colourful non-lightfast inks. These inks will gradually fade over time as they come into contact with direct sunlight. Future Perfect is unique to the exhibition 3 different nights, recurring as not only is it the first time that the artist has produced a painted series of work but they are central to the exhibition as they are a beautiful combination of the research for the three major new films by Weir, Black Square (2015), Darkroom (2015) and A Reflection on Light (2015). Black Square is a journey of discovering the location of a black hole, a journey in the film that results in capturing the last unknown in physics as one tenth of a pixel, the artist recreates the pixelated form as the delicate colour blocks. Weir explores the relationship between reconstruction and photography in the double projection Darkroom. In the film the artist produces a photograph in Mary Rosse’s original darkroom in Birr Castle. Rosse was a pioneer in photography in Ireland in the 1850s. The photographic ink used from this process is a poetic connection to this film; the medium that has the ability to fix a moment in time, but only temporarily. The colour and placement of forms is an homage to the Cubist movement in Ireland through the work by the Irish artist Mainie Jellett (1897-1944) in the 1930s seen in grand scale the cinematic film A Reflection on Light. Cubism brought new ideas of representation in art, where shapes can seamlessly transition between colours of no relation and form, Jellett’s paintings are non-representational and go beyond the boundaries of artistic practice. Weir takes the primary idea of Cubism and in doing so has created a delicate study of colourful overlapping broken shapes. Future Perfect has been specially developed for the exhibition. The work is displayed directly opposite the windows, exposed to direct sunlight, the artwork is continually changing and evolving. Weir describes the title of the work, the future perfect, as the most commonly used term to describe an action that will have happened or will be finished by a specific point in the future; this work will be completed tomorrow. It is a grammatical combination of the future tense and the perfect and a term that views an event as prior and completed. Situated at the central point of 3 different nights, recurring this body of work brings together Weir’s main themes of the philosophies of time, light, history and the universe from her practice and the attempt to represent the unrepresentable.