Another Perspective, is a new exhibition by Peter Richards which invites visitors to see something from another point of view, prompting them to consider their role as unreliable author of their own truth. Sometimes, it is difficult to believe what you think you see. For the exhibition Richards has moved his current enquiry from his studio to the Derry City Walls. “I’ve been reconstructing trapeziums to visualise a square through a lens and I think, essentially, this is an engagement with an optics of truth”. Essentially, his work engages with the subtle nuance between the experience of an event and the experience of its meditation, and how both shape things differently. It’s not like either one is presented as more true than the other, especially when you add in to that equation as he is keen to do time for reflection. Over the last year in his studio Richards has revisited Jan Dibbets’ Perspective Correction works of the late 1960s and attempted to work through how these works were originally constructed. Works made during the year then culminated in his most recent solo exhibition ‘The Square’.
If you can see one and the same thing at the same time in different states, which one do you believe? I think that goes back then to how we process the political today. We are engaged in one-to-one conversations with our peers, with society at large, and then we’re subjected to the mediation of news, all of which shape our understanding. But I feel they can all be unreliable. I enjoy working in this ambiguous space, as the unreliable narrator of my shifts in understanding. Richards has reflected on the formation and role of representation, focusing on relationships between time and reference. In his solo exhibition ‘Intuitive Actions, Common Attributes and Isolated Incidents’, 2015, Richards explicitly coupled his concern with re-presentation and the agency of display as a means of constructing simultaneous and competing truths.
Peter Richards, born Cardiff, is an artist based in Belfast, in the North of Ireland. He works in a range of media including forms of photography, installation and performance. His works can be seen as artistic enquiries into subjects, such as: how understanding is formed and truth is subscribed to; how we each have the capacity to suspend disbelief in order to continue believing in chosen truths.
Richards often engages with interactions between re-presentation, time and referencing. His first solo exhibition Corrective Perspective was at the Context Gallery, Derry in 1996. Since that time he has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including: Intuitive Actions, Common Attributes and Isolated Incidents, Millennium Court Art Centre, (UK); Art of the Troubles, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the Ulster Museum, (UK); Live, Live Art, Cornerhouse, Manchester, (UK); Dogs Have No Religion, Czech Museum of Fine Art, Prague, (CZ); The Belfast Way, Herzelyia Museum, Tel Aviv, (IL); Voices Travel, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art, Kaohsiung (TW); New Contemporaries 99, South London Gallery & Liverpool Biennale, (UK); Memorials, Belfast Exposed, Belfast, (UK); Recent Works, Model Arts Centre, Sligo,(IE); NI Gulp, Plugin ICA, Winnipeg, (CA); Elective Perspective, Galeria Arsenal, Bialystok, (PL); Revolution, Galerie Deadfly, Berlin, (DE); Les Intermittences du coeur, EX ELETTROFONICA, Rome (IT); L’art dans le monde, Paris Musées, Pont Alexandre III, Paris, (FR); Vailartis – Arttakesthestreets, Grupo Forja & La Sala Naranja, Valencia (ES); Return, The National Gallery, Goethe Institute, Dublin (IE); Richards, ZDSLU Gallery, Ljubljana (SI) and Northern Irelands inaugural presentation at the la Biennale di Venezia 51, The Nature of Things – The Long Weekend, Artists from Northern Ireland.
This exhibition is curated by Gregory McCartney. Thanks to Peter Richards and Paola Bernardelli.
This exhibition is funded by Derry City and Strabane District Council.
