From the Studios: Richard Proffitt 'You're Not Dreaming Anymore'

From the Studios features new and existing artwork, alongside opportunities for experimentation and testing ideas as online projects. We present a glimpse into artists’ studio practice through our website and social media platforms.

We are privileged to have thirty artists’ studios along with our gallery at TBG+S. During the Covid 19 crisis, this online platform is a small gesture of support for artists who endeavour to maintain their practice without access to their studios and materials, or the processes with which they normally work.

In the first of this series, Richard Proffitt has made a new series of work comprising four short videos that will be released daily at 12 noon from Tuesday 14 to Friday 17 April, on this page and via Instagram @TBGandS.

You’re Not Dreaming Anymore is a series of short video collages made during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown. All of the video footage was filmed within the restricted 2km radius of the artist's house during daily walks in and around currently abandoned Dublin Docklands developments. Other visual elements are taken from household objects, personal notebooks and other miscellaneous found material. The videos are brief portals of escape into a kaleidoscopic, dreamlike reversal of the everyday.

Richard Proffitt's work in painting, sculpture and sound is inspired by a stream of consciousness recollection of histories, memories, dreams, fact and fiction, and driven by an interest in found material that consists of thematically sourced objects, paper ephemera, junk and sound recordings. The works often combine to create immersive, otherworldly, site-responsive installation works that evoke places of worship one may imagine existing in an intermingling cosmic universe of esoteric folk religions, the bedroom of a teenage loner, a spaghetti western and the remote habitat of a psychedelic death cult. However, the information and imagery they are loaded with is a personal form of esoterica born from the written word, from memories and personal and artistic history. The work is not about psychedelia but informed by psychedelia, the things at the back of your brain manifesting into word, voice and image.

Richard Proffitt born 1985, Liverpool, UK. Previous exhibitions include: Display, Link and Cure, The Complex, Dublin, Ireland, 2019; May The Moon Rise And The Sun Set, UCC Music Department, Cork, Ireland, 2019 (Solo); They Call Us The Screamers, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, 126 Gallery, Galway, Ireland, 2017; Wild Cries of Ha-Ha, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, Ireland, 2015; A Modern Panarion, The Hugh Lane, Dublin, Ireland, 2014.

Richard Proffitt, You’re Not Dreaming Anymore, 2020, Digital videos, 1 min, colour, sound