Danny Treacy
Page 1 | 2 | Biography
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Born: 28.02.75
Lives: London
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Education
2000 - 2002: MA, Fine Art Photography, Royal College of Art, London.
1995 - 1998: BA Hons, Editorial Photography, University of Brighton.
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2006: �Mutual Appropriations�, Encosta Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal.
2005: �To Be Continued�, British Council show, Helsinki, Finland.
2005: �The Instant of my Death�, Gallery Dels Angels, Barcelona, Spain.
2004: 'The House In The Middle', Towner Gallery, Eastbourne.
2004: 'The Jerwood Photography Prize', Stills Gallery, Edinburgh.
2004: 'The Jerwood Photography Prize', Impressions Gallery, York.
2003: 'Them', University of California, Davis, California, U.S.A.
2003: �You Belong to Me�, Catto Contemporary, London.
2003: �Twenty White Chairs�, The Wapping Project, London.
2003: �Don�t You Forget About Me�, Studio Voltaire, London.
2002: �The Show�, Royal College of Art, London.
2002: �The Red Mansion Spero Prize�, London Institute Gallery, London.
2002: �Show no Mercy�, The Century Gallery, London.
2001: �Flip Flop�, Ecole des Beaux Artes, Nantes, France.
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2005: To Be Continued. ISBN 0-86-355-5489.
2004: The House in the Middle. ISBN 1-903-796-14-8.
2006: 'Vitamin Ph',Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-4656-2.
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2003: The Inaugural Jerwood/Portfolio Photography Award.
2002: The Photographer�s Gallery Award.
1998: The Nagoya University of Arts� Award (Japan).
1998: The Tom Buckeridge Photography Prize.
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One Leg Cocked: In his essay The Obelisk[1], Georges Bataille politicises the space that is created by the erection of a monument; around it the mob gathers. His reference is the Obelisk at Place de La Concorde in Paris, whereas for Treacy a site so public and with so much light pollution, as he calls any unnatural nocturnal light, would be rejected. His methodologies necessitate spaces which are, at night, dark and uninviting, thus quiet, where the mob is absent but spectral, an accumulation of prior presences (over time). Thus Treacy gravitates towards graveyards, parks, underpasses, clearings, estates. Treacy�s life-sized colour photograms of variant obelisk-like structures, made in situ, usually outside at night, are undeniably erotic and thus demanding, returning to the monument an ancient, more sexually charged meaning[2]. The subject itself only ever registers as a flare, dappled with detail where the paper made physical contact with the object, the night registered only as a black liquescence. For Treacy the resulting image is somewhat secondary to the process of its production. The photogram acts as document of the event of contact, for example, rather than indexical trace of an identifiable object. A transubstantial registering of the experience of night and drive. What remains on these sites of the mob is a fall-out of discarded items and abandoned clothes. Like crowded cadavers, observing itself from the inside, Treacy�s re-tailored body-suits are the by-product of an amassed collection of these discarded items, found mainly on the sites of his other bodies of work. As a series, �THEM� re-enacts a macabre shroud to the damned and dispossessed. As utterance, they are spoken in a profane language. Each element and combination of clothing speaks in a loaded, coded and unapologetically private way. The use of large format, fine-grain film allows for photographic detail in all its promiscuity[3], giving the clothing an excessively evidential quality which is simultaneously forensic and anthropological. But it is also pathological. These are his trophies; he will wear them only once, then move on to the next, nevertheless retaining all past suits, each one carefully packed into dry cleaning bags and hung, slowly rotting on the inside, on a rail. If the works exist as secondary to their production, evidence of the intimacy involved in each process nevertheless reveals itself in the details: in some of the erections images you can see Treacy�s fingerprints or shoe prints tenderly embedded in the work, due to damper atmospheric conditions; in the combinations of textures, damage and sex, lovingly and pathologically re-tailored in the body-suits; in the fact that both the erection structures and the figures are all the same size as him. He talks readily of his libidinal urge to produce these images, to show off his trophies, of how without this drive, there would be no point in the expenditure involved. From the position of a kind of radical machismo, Treacy manages to transgress sexual borders. In as much as his project is aggressively frontal, let�s say, phallic, it is about a kind of tenderness, and a non-gender specific femininity pervades the work. The sewing of the body-suits would be an obvious example of this: a kind of needlework which hovers between the labour of the seamstress and that of the psychopath. > > > >I suspect that Treacy is instinctively suspicious of language, refusing to obey its Law. Treacy enters rooms and other spaces as if sticking his hand inside the body. It is the insides of the room as body which are revealed again and again in different guises across his three major bodies of work of the last five years and through which Treacy, in exposing himself to and through the room, exposes the fallacies of the Imperishable monument, and the civilized human animal[4]. Through his patchworks of sloughed skins and colour photograms, a Nameable and Law-abiding thing, or body, or structure, falls into the realm of the Unnameable, forcing us, behind him, to trespass and transgress innumerable, ultimately individual boundaries. Visions of Excess, p215, Georges Bataille see Bataille essay. [3] Ian Jeffrey�s term. [4] To paraphrase John Gray�s Straw Dogs (Thoughts on Humans and other Animals)(2002), a book to which Treacy refers in conversation.
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2006: 'Vitamin Ph',Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-4656-2.
2006: Livraison. No 2. ISBN 91-975633-0-7.
2006: Portfolio Catalogue. No.43. ISSN 1354-4446.
2004: Camera Austria. 88/2004. ISSN 1915-1915.
2004: Blueprint. No. 218. ISSN 0268-4926.
2003: Portfolio Catalogue. No.38. ISSN 1354-4446.
2003: Photoworks. Autumn/Winter 2003. ISSN 1742-1659.
2003: Another Magazine. Spring/Summer Edition. ISSN 1355-5901.
2002: Art Review (The Best of the Graduate Shows). ISSN 0004-4091.
2002: Hot Shoe International. August. ISSN 0959-6933.
2002: i-D Magazine. Issue No.224. ISSN 0262-357.
2002: Tank. Vol 3. Issue 3. ISSN 1664-3472.
2000: Creative Review. Vol 20. No.3.
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