Sirius Arts Centre presents an exhibition by RORY TANGNEY

Opening Saturday 18 October at 5pm

Dublin based artist Rory Tangney combines found and new materials with sound in a body of work that poses the question – can science provide us with what we need in a post-religious world? Ideas about obsolescence; of technology, people and ideas, emerge through sculptural objects, sound and drawings that are carefully imagined and skill-fully made.

This Way To Enchantment, is essentially a search for spirit within the machine. Through works which engage with technology, old and new, relying on conventional, modern materials as well as salvaged materials that would normally be found in other contexts.

Tangney’s history as a furniture maker informs his sculpture, sound and drawing works relying on a process of making to create aesthetically potent and formal works. He focuses on the idea that manual skills provide a rootedness in the physical world, as if to say we are still physical beings walking on solid ground.

One of his large sculptures Consensus, is composed of a forest of salvaged reel-to-reel audiotape of random radio recordings from the past 40 years. The salvaged tape, before being cut up for the sculpture work, was harvested for its audio content. Some of these sounds, along with manual tape effects, re-emerge in the sound work, which also uses field recordings and extracts from YouTube clips.

Recordings taken in a hospital MRI booth provide an explosive background to the second work When All Is Said And Done. Here, the voice of Peter Higgs, the scientist who proposed the existence of the God Particle, recounts his life’s work along with an unidentified piece of music taken from one of the old tapes.

What emerges is the central concern of the exhibition, the artist’s search for something beyond the material.

Exhibition runs until Sunday 16 November