David Monaghan’s ‘On Leaving’ enters its final phase

This entry was posted on October 6, 2016 by , in Economy, emigration, Fund raising, History, News and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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The photographer, David Monahan, with some of the first series of photographs for Leaving Dublin.

Melburnians will remember David Monahan’s moving photographic exhibition, On Leaving, at the Immigration Museum,  based on the compelling photos of emigrants about to leave Ireland as the Global Financial Crisis began to bite.

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Many of you may have bought the handsome book, with its many stories as well

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The lavish, prize-winning printed record of a migration.

as fine reproductions of the original photographic studies. This book, On Leaving, went on to win the 2015 printing industry award for the best printed book in Ireland.

Now David Monahan moves towards the final chapter in his work which helps to tell the story of Irish people during this time. It is timely as the Central Statistics Office only last month declared the period of net emigration to be over.

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Beyond Leaving is a new series and the title of David Monahan’s upcoming show in Dublin. It is the final movement in a suite of works that spans the period of net emigration.

The work features a series of over 25 new large scale (1metre x pastedgraphic-5 1.3metre) photographic works shot in 2016 on location in Dublin, Toronto, Ohio, Chicago, Surrey and Wicklow. It will hang for 4 months from November to late February 2017 at the National Photographic Archive, Temple Bar, Dublin.

Aoife Mc Monocle: the original parting shot from the Leaving Dublin series; a similarly composed shot made 6 years later in Toronto; and a straight on head and shoulders portrait which seeks eye contact with the viewer.

Aoife Mc Monocle (top to bottom): the original parting shot from the Leaving Dublin series; a similarly composed shot made 6 years later in Toronto; and a straight on head and shoulders portrait which seeks eye contact with the viewer.

The work also  features video, interview, text and artefact made over the entire period of the works and is a timely appraisal of a dark period of Irish European and World history from the perspective of people who left Ireland during this time.
This show seeks to find the distance between these travellers’ expectations and the reality of their lives today. As such the work therefore becomes a metaphor for the precarious nature of modern life and a place in which to evaluate our society’s reactions to the financial downturn.
This new work  takes  it’s place in a linear suite of works.It follows on from the Leaving Dublin series and once more follows its conventions of composition pose and lighting. It shares some of the intimate surroundings of the collaborators with the audience before making the jump  to a straight on confrontational head  and shoulders portrait whose large size sets out to confront  the audience, and as an extension, society, with its reality. It demands acceptance of this time and this chapter of emigration as truths.

A fund:it campaign for this exhibition has gone live for two weeks until 23 September. Take a look,  feel free to share the project on your social networks and if you can, support the work by making a pledge.

For more information about this project, see the artist’s blogspot.