‘Last of the Visioners’: an exhibition of key romantic painting

Curated by Niamh Moriarty and Ruth Clinton, the 'Last of the Visioners' exhibition explores how early 20th-century representation of Ireland has come to shape the national and diasporic consciousness. 

The art curators have been working together for over ten years using performance, video, sound installation, storytelling, and a detailed research process to convey visions of transience and resistance. 

'Last of the Visioners', from July  21 until September 9, at The Model Sligo, presents key romantic works by active artists during Ireland's revolutionary period and formative early years of the Free State and are exhibited against contemporary works made in North America and Ireland. 

Niamh, based in Glenfarne Co Leitrim, explains that along with the research process, they started to track the relationship between Irish immigrants in America regarding postcolonialism. "The train is a strong symbol of colonial power and colonial technological progress. 

"In Ireland and also in the United States, many Irish people worked building the train line that moved from the East to the West. When we were thinking about the island collection, we were picking out paintings that exemplify this idea of the West as an empty landscape full of potential and full of beauty", she said.

 Pictured are visitor looking at 'My Neighbour Tommy' by Tuna Al-Sarraj

'Last of the Visioners' presents these selected paintings from The Niland Collection as a 'promise' to a burgeoning nation and gives prominence to more recent depictions of the ecological realities, partisan violence and enduring colonial gaze that have affected western landscapes in the ensuing years. 

"When I started to look up the western rail corridor, the diffuse back from Sligo, down to Limerick, that led us to think about how the West is held in the popular imagination both in Ireland and America", says the Sligo art curator, Ruth Clinton.

The art curators explain that the railway was presented as a glorious feat of engineering and a crucial step in 'conquering' the American West. "The 19th-century railroads drove the destruction of Indigenous people's way of life, abandoned thousands of unprepared settlers in hostile environments and vastly enriched a handful of urban capitalists by exploiting migrant labour".

Pictured are Ruth Clinton speaking to Dany Guest at The Model

'Last of the Visioners' displays works from the past two decades through a non-chronological framework in a documentary-style media by artists Kevin Jerome Everson, Emily McFarland, Tuqa Al-Sarraj, Kent Monkman and Steven Yazzie that will commune with the visionary paintings of, among others, Sean Keating, Paul Henry, George William Russell and Jack B. Yeats.

"We were inspired by the idea of the West in popular American culture from the Western film genre. At the same time, at the turn of the century, the kind of paintings that were being made in the Old Republic of Ireland. We are thinking of blending those two histories through more contemporary artworks", Niamh said. 

Since the opening at The Model Sligo, the exhibition has received positive feedback. "The gallery respondents were very interested in the idea because it is sort of a new life with a different spin on them. Supposedly, people are enjoying it", Ruth says. 

Pictured are Niamh Moriarty, Aoife Hammond and Aoife Leddy

Niamh Moriarty and Ruth Clinton look forward to expanding the 'Last of the Visioners' to Dublin and are open to the possibilities in other parts of the world. The art curators continue researching and creating new work based on postcolonial stories. 

"We have been working on a few projects. The next one will be a series of books we have made researching libraries and archives from Trinity College again about postcolonial histories in Ireland and ideas of the West of the United States. There is, at least, another year working on our art practice work", Niamh added.