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INSTALLATION WORK
ARTIST STATEMENT
Jim Ricks pieces together the complex and tangled stories of capitalism by re-connecting and re-creating real-world fragments into a new narrative. By selecting and linking the quotidian and re-fabricating or re-contextualising them, the seemingly indisputable real objects do the story telling. A Duchampian conflict between the bourgeois sphere of art and real world imagery begins. By creating links, associations and synchronicities between objects he includes a wide range of ideas through associative conceptual and formal relationships. Or rather, by using a methodology close to that of conspiracy theorieshe connects and creates a new history. As such his work can be seen as a semiological investigation into context, combination, disintegration, and the gap between real stories and ‘manufactured’ identities. Ricks’ work is also influenced by his background as a prolific graffiti artist and a political activist.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in California, Jim Ricks received his MFA from the National University of Ireland, Galway and Burren College of Art programme and his BFA from the California College of the Arts. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and recently received the Artlink ‘New Art Award’ which features a solo show in July 2010 (Buncrana, Co. Donegal) and was selected for Video Killed the Radio Star at the Royal Hibernian Academy, January – February 2010 (Dublin). ). He has upcoming shows with the MART European Tour, 2010 (London, Oslo, Berlin, St. Peterburg, etc.) and a solo show at the Ennistymon Courthouse Gallery and Studios in 2011.
In 2009 he exhibited in The World Shrinks for Those Who Own It, with Oliver Heinzenberger, Galway Arts Centre and The Life and Times of Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, Monster Truck Gallery and Studios (Dublin) participated in Frieze Projects’ COPYSTAND: Autonomous Manufacturing Zone by Stephanie Syjuco (London) and Galway City’s Culture Night, collaborated on The Doctor is In, with Dr. Áine Phillips at the Straylight Performance Art Festival (Dublin) and This Must Be the Place, Irish Museum of Contemporary Art (Dublin). He is currently working on a touring public work, Poulnabrone Bouncy Dolmen, which is part of the Ground Up Artist Collective’s ‘Aughty Temporary Art Projects’, Spring – Autumn 2010. Ricks is also involved with organising projects with Cause Collective and for Dorm, May 2010 at the Model (Sligo). He was chairperson and responsible for the curation of 126, Artist-run gallery (Galway) from 2008 – 2009.
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