PROJECT SPACE
ICONS
SIMON O’CARRIGAN
Icons is a series of small oil on linen portraits, painted in a realistic style. The layered glazes used are techniques popularized by religious devotional portraits as the technology of making oil paint allowed for increasingly realistic portrayals.
These icons, though, are not religious figures but modern icons of worship: rock stars (from Neil Young to Ozzy Osbourne). In the current millennium, this collection of not-so-recent rock figures still command worship by fans, and influence current musicians.
These canonical rock stars achieve this despite their failings (and sometimes because of them). They are musicians who were critical of—and often scathing toward—the media.
With the subjects frequently losing their words mid-interview (or speaking unintelligible gibberish), the image of their expression spoke their thousand words for them. The imagery is drawn from the now vast, museum-like archive of YouTube: ironically preserving what was designed to be a temporary medium.
