Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance

May 24–August 30, 2009
Hoffman Galleries

On May 24, the Dallas Museum of Art will premiere Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance, an exhibition of works by one of the most important artists to emerge from Northern Ireland in the past three decades, and a two-time nominee for the Tate’s Turner Prize. The exhibition, described by the New York Times as “one of those little gems of a show, . . . an original curatorial effort presenting a body of new work by a major artist,” brings together for the first time Doherty’s Ghost Story—a tensely beautiful fifteen-minute media work based on landscape and memory, recently acquired for the DMA’s collections—and a selection of eleven powerful photographs of the Irish and Northern Irish landscape from the 1990s.

“Willie Doherty’s art joins history, memory, and language into an enveloping experience for the viewer, one that is rich in beauty and apprehension in the same measure,” says Charles Wylie, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art and the exhibition’s curator. “This is only the second exhibition on Doherty’s work to be organized by an American institution, and we are extremely honored to be able to bring this important work to our audiences.”

Willie Doherty’s interest in the Irish ghost story, as well as being born and raised in Northern Ireland during the time of the Troubles, informs the background for his video installation in this exhibition. Ghost Story powerfully evokes a mind at work trying to recall unsettling things, and the impact troubling memories have on the present day. Through a mesmerizing series of vivid imagery—including a lonely forest path with an ever-receding vanishing point, a darkened city underpass with a mysterious figure, and a pair of eyes perhaps looking to the past or the future—Doherty has created a masterful cinematic tale of quiet suspense whose evocative text (written by Doherty himself) is narrated by the renowned Irish actor Stephen Rea. Ghost Story was critically acclaimed when it appeared at the 2007 Venice Biennale, where Doherty represented Northern Ireland, and the Dallas Museum of Art is the only American museum to have acquired it for its collection.

Ghost Story is paired with eleven large-scale color photographs from the 1990s that depict the famed Irish landscape as a site of barriers and roadblocks set amidst lyrical beauty. Created well before Ghost Story, Doherty’s photographs from the 1990s act as precursors and complements to the video work and provide further evidence of the sense of quiet unease unique to his art. Together, these works offer a compelling comparison between how our vision and thought process still and moving images, and will provide an intensely absorbing experience of an undeniably beautiful yet still little understood landscape.

Since the mid-1980s, Willie Doherty’s photographs and media works have been included in numerous one-person exhibitions at American and international institutions such as Kunsthalle Bern (1996); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1996); Tate Gallery Liverpool (1998); The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (1999); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2002); and Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2006). In 2007 an exhibition of Doherty’s time-based work was held at the Kunstverein, Hamburg; the Munich Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus; and the Kunstbau. His work has appeared in important international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International, and the Sao Paolo Biennial, and is in the collections of major museums in this country and abroad.

Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and is accompanied by a 96-page, full-color catalogue published and distributed through Yale University Press. It includes an essay on the artist’s work by Charles Wylie; a brief biography by Erin Murphy, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Contemporary Art and Decorative Arts and Design; extensive stills from Ghost Story and its complete text; and reproductions of all eleven photographs. Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance will travel to the Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, in fall 2010.

Exhibition support for Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance is provided by the Contemporary Art Fund through a bequest from the estate of Brooke Aldridge in honor of Cindy and Howard Rachofsky and through the gifts of an anonymous donor, Arlene and John Dayton, Laura and Walter Elcock, Amy and Vernon Faulconer, Kenny Goss and George Michael, Nancy and Tim Hanley, Marguerite S. Hoffman, Suzanne and Patrick McGee, Allen and Kelli Questrom, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, Deedie and Rusty Rose, Gayle and Paul Stoffel, and Sharon and Michael Young.

This exhibition is number 53 in the Dallas Museum of Art’s Concentrations series, support for which is provided by the Donor Circle membership program through leadership gifts of Gail B. and Dan W. Cook III, Claire Dewar, Nancy and Tim Hanley, Marguerite S. Hoffman, Caren Prothro, and Cindy and Howard Rachofsky.  Air transportation provided by American Airlines.

Press:

New York Times article, 3/16/09

New York Times audio slide show, 3/16/09

KERA’s THINK, 6/19/09

Images:

Willie Doherty, The Outskirts, 1994, Cibachrome photograph on aluminum, Dallas Museum of Art, anonymous gift, 1997.17, © Willie Doherty

Willie Doherty, Ghost Story, 2007, color and sound single-screen installation, continuous loop, Dallas Museum of Art, DMA/amfAR Benefit Auction Fund, 2008.11, © Willie Doherty