New Town Centre Project (Extract #1) is a new work developed by Ronan McCrea and produced by Draíocht, in response to the very particular geography of the Blanchardstown Town Centre. Comprising of an installation of photographic slide projections and audio soundtracks the work explores the Blanchardstown Town Centre as both an enigma and an emblematic form: a form over determined by some of the most significant social and political forces of recent Irish history. A range of ideas are touched on in this work, including retail theory and practice; early photography and the capture of movement; the privatisation of public space; urban planning; pre-worn jeans and globalisation; interiors and exteriors; model making and the meaning of ruins. These topics, among others, cross mingle between voice-over monologue and projected photographic images made in and around the Blanchardstown Town Centre during 2008.
Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project”, New Town Centre Project (Extract #1) presents a rich associative montage of sources and images. Projected photographic images dissolve, flash and are static, interwoven with the voice of a female narrator, played by Yemi Adenuga, who tells of an unspecified protagonist’s tangential thoughts, reports, anecdotes and quotes.
The artist has also made an architectural intervention in the gallery, splitting the space in two. On one side is a darkened environment for the slide projections. On the other side of the wall an inaccessible empty space is created in the gallery, only visible through the windows from outside the building.