Artist Insights: John Carson | TULCA 2024
Artist Insights is a series of short interviews with artists featured in TULCA Festival of Visual Arts. The series offers a deeper look into the work of the participating artists, exploring their creative processes, motivations, and themes behind their work. Presented across multiple galleries in Galway city, the series provides a reflective perspective on the role of contemporary art in the cultural landscape, highlighting the diverse voices that contribute to this annual festival in the west of Ireland.
John Carson
John Carson is a Belfast born artist who has worked in various media to provocatively explore the interface between high and low culture. He has exhibited and performed internationally and has made works for television and radio. He taught at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London UK from 1991 to 2006 and in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh USA from 2006 to 2022. A collection of artworks by Carson, spanning over five decades of his practice, features throughout The Salvage Agency. From his life in Belfast in the 1970s, before years spent in Los Angeles, London and today Pittsburgh, Carson’s enthusiastic endeavours appear as a form of storytelling, peppered with insightful wit and humour.
At the Galway Tourist Office near the Spanish Arch, his poster- style artwork, I’d Walk From Cork To Larne To See The Forty Shades Of Green, is placed amongst brochures and guide maps, presenting a subtle variation on the famous phrase. Based on a 1959 song by Johnny Cash, Carson journeyed by foot from south to north over fourteen days, photographing the colour green along the way. Instead of the sickly-sweet romance evoked in Cash’s lyrics, Carson’s green pragmatically extends to the colour of industrial buildings, an often-mundane roadside landscape, and the combat trousers of British troops, stationed on the border – all part of Ireland in 1978.
Screened at the Pálás cinema, the video American Medley embodies a tour to fifty locations in the United States famed in popular music – from New York, New York to California Dreaming and more in between.
In Carson Street, a new video debuted at TULCA, he investigates why one of the main thoroughfares in Pittsburgh, where he now lives, bears his surname. Describing his piece as a mockumentary, his enquiries find him engaging in kerbside conversations, visiting local residents and businesses, exploring historical archives, consulting experts, and eventually departing for Philadelphia to pursue a promising lead, one inevitably associated with and entangled into colonial structures of place and its people.
Documentation: Laura Griffin
