Protests Come and Go - The Entropy Series

About 'Protests Come and Go': “Protests come and go...” – Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, televised RTE interview, October 14th, 2015. ‘Protests Come and Go’ is a conceptual visual arts project developed from analogue photography shot at public protest rallies in Dublin city throughout 2015. It is, in many ways, a picture of indifference. Envisioned as a response to Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan’s remark that “protests come and go,” the work effectively hijacks his point of view and creates at times a grim, melancholic aesthetic in order to condemn the very idea it embodies. In this sense, the work is a form of dark parody. Above all other artistic intentions, this work was primarily created to be an ironic visual companion to the minister’s sentiments and in many ways could be considered a conceptual view of public discontent from the window of the very powerful and indifferent. The project does not take an entirely documentary-photography approach to a social-political issue, challenging its target in a purely representational manner, but instead the work was influenced by a variety of artistic disciplines as well as contemporary photography and was created with a more painterly, expressive style in order to explore more conceptual territory, this being a common feature of my work. In reality the camera was pointed at the protesters, but the true picture in this work is of those they are protesting against.