FÁILTE | WELCOME

Fáilte and welcome to the Carrickahowley Gallery’s Lughnasadh exhibition, featuring the work of Syril Quinn and Judy Taylor.

Curator's Notes

Contemporary art has challenged any number of traditional categories of creative practice over the past thirty years, questioning previously held ideas and problematic labeling from gender assumptions to racialist imaginaries to notions of fine art vs. folk art, craft, and other such rubrics. The connections to these categorizations have also become challenged, such as the false equating of “craft” with “women’s work”, a notion that also intersects with issues of labor and industry vs. the fine arts of supposed philosophical and “male” creation. Indeed, as Roszika Parker has shown (along with countless other critics now), the history of the textile industries in the US and Europe particularly has been replete with such assumptions, connecting “women” with any “needle work” and labeling that as craft. Such categories, like the false distinctions between “high art” and “low art” magnify other biases, prejudices, false borders and boundaries that intersect with ideologies of power and mastery (patriarchy and colonialism in particular). This Lughnasadh 2023 exhibit seeks to question those false borders, boundaries, labels, categories and ideological assumptions, asking a central question about craft and labor. In league with the Labor Day holiday that punctuates the exhibit, we feature two artists: Syril Quinn and Judy Taylor who are both concerned with the ways in which these false distinctions intersect with histories of Irish America and struggles against oppression. Such a focus is not without its own history, as the Irish American experience is historically one of significant contributions to labor movements and consciousness in the US, from the very creation of the term boycott to the Molly Maguires and their resistance, to the numerous union-building efforts, strikes, and organizations (Ancient Order of Hibernians, Knights of Labor, and many more) dedicated to social justice and labor rights. In league with these, both of the artists in this exhibit offer new historical perspectives and challenge myths and misconceptions.

Syril Quinn perhaps says this better in his artist statement than I could here, but the fascinating aspects of his work all dovetail around issues of craft/fine art, myth/history, kitsch/philosophical art, and the relation to Irish American histories. Crafted as a tableau of non-threatening figures, Quinn’s work at first seems innocuous to the typical viewer. And yet, with closer inspection and critical perspective, the tableau resonates with all sorts of deeper meanings and challenges. What seems mere craft (whatever that means) becomes a rather profound comment on how we craft our histories into neat packages, myths of ourselves and our Irish ancestries. What emerges then is a new vision of our tendencies to reduce our histories to “cute” representations, to stereotypes, to cliches—and we realize that we have been somewhat lured by Quinn into reproducing those as we view the figures and the tableau. Ireland becomes “magically delicious” as it were, and Quinn calls us out on the cheap marketing of ourselves into stage roles and theatrical exaggerations.

Judy Taylor, on the other hand, in her Labor Murals now housed at the Maine State Museum, is far more direct in her resistance work. Again, her artist statements that can be found on the museum site (mainestatemuseum.org/maine-labor-mural/) are far more articulate about this, but the main thrust of these murals could be summed up as presenting the histories so often buried. Public in their approach as murals, they openly share these histories of labor, struggle, even forgetting as they remind us that, as Maureen Dezell puts it in her Irish America: Coming into Clover, “It is time to remember, to recognize, to render.” To the struggle for labor rights and the significance of folk traditions in contemporary struggles, Carrickahowley Gallery proudly salutes both artists and offers a “labor intensive” exhibit for 2023. Enjoy!

Syril Quinn

Quinn | Artist Bio

Living in the west Puget Sound area and taking inspiration from the landscape surrounding him, Syril Quinn has found a unique artistic medium in small scale wood-sculpting, carving, and general woodwork. As an avid fan of mythology and folklore, Quinn employs imagery and textures from tales of his Irish-Welsh heritage and attempts to transform them into tangible representations of a forgotten past. Evoking notions of Hiraeth-an untranslatable Celtic word which most often can be understood as a homesickness for a lost moment or place- Quinn’s piece sees a horizontal flow of similar and yet increasingly more refined male bearded figures, meant to be read right to left to mimic the Irish immigrant flow to America's east coast, which are caricature totems of Ireland's ancient religious figures, or druids. These faces are the result of a forced dilution of the Irish pagan concept which took place prior to and during the migration, with assimilation seeing the Irish folk experience of the revered Druid and mystical Fae morph into small, and often comically harmless, representations of themselves. The druid here becomes a bumbling, sightless wizard, unable to perform and unable to 'see' with a reflective lens, completely unobjectionable in its charming absurdity. Power becomes unbelievable magic. Accompanied by books bearing the ogham writing style slowly fading on their covers, the artifact of the early Irish religious experience is reduced to a theater of myth, innocuous in its abstractions and hypotonicity. The hiraeth of the Irish American is crystallized and born of a landlessness-a loss of the firm and the firmament.

Judy Taylor

Taylor | Artist Bio

Judy’s work consists of figurative and narrative paintings, labor-focused work, landscapes and portraiture. Her scenes of workers and nature found on the Island often incorporate island residents as models. Prior to coming to Maine she lived in New York City, transferring there from Chicago to study figurative art. She was accepted into New York Academy of Art on full scholarship and received her Masters certificate in their pilot program. She went on to study painting at the National Academy of Design with Harvey Dinnerstein and Ron Sherr. In 1996 she relocated to Maine and was an Artist-in- Residence at Acadia National Park. Since 2002 she has resided full time in Maine where she maintains her studio and teaches there and at workshops in Austin, New York, Italy and France. In 2007 she was awarded the commission to paint the History of Labor in Maine which took a full year to complete. Her work is in many public and private collections including: Johns Hopkins University, the United States Park System, Friends of Acadia, and the Jackson Laboratory.

judytaylorstudio.com