CAG.3037 Martin Healy, A Moment Twice Lived, 2016, HD digital film (1/5), 11:45 minutes. Purchased, the Artist, 2016. © the artist.
WORK OF THE WEEK!
A Moment Twice Lived (2016) by Martin Healy is a short film that explores our perception of the passage of time through the subjective experience of memory, aging, and dreaming.
In it, we observe a solitary figure studying the surface of a painting, Banditti around a Campfire (c.1796), which is attributed to the Cork artist Nathaniel Grogan (1740-1807).
As she begins to sense she has seen the image before, the film’s circuitous narrative shifts, oscillating between two inter-connected scenes and revealing how our lived experiences often distort in our memory into increasingly blurred distinctions between the past, present, and future.
Martin Healy, A Moment Twice Lived, 2016, HD digital film, 11.45 minutes. Purchased, the Artist, 2016. © the artist
In the film, Healy references J.W. Dunne’s influential An Experiment with Time (1927), a book that proposes specific ideas of precognition and temporality, which was to be an influence of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, C.S. Lewis, Rumer Godden, Vladimir Nabokov, J.R.R. Tolkien, and H.G. Wells.
Fun Fact: parts of the film were shot in the wood-panelled library of Crawford Art Gallery!
Martin Healy (b.1967) works with photography, film, and sculpture to explore the cultural and symbolic paradigms that underpin human mythologies and belief systems. His works have been shown widely, both nationally and internationally, including at Crawford Art Gallery and The Glucksman, Cork; Butler Gallery, Kilkenny; CCA Andratx, Mallorca; and Kasteel Wijlre, Netherlands. Filmed in the old terminal of Cork Airport, the artist’s Last Man (2011) is also in the Collection.
Martin Healy’s A Moment Twice Lived shows daily in our Screening Room until 30 June.
The Arts House: Conor Tallon chats with curator Michael Waldron about a work from the Collection every Sunday morning on Cork’s 96FM and C103 Cork.
