The Exiled Forever Coming into Land

Ged Quinn
The Exiled Forever Coming into Land
2010
Oil on canvas
200 x 320 cm

Ged Quinn is a painter based in the U.K. His work has been exhibited around the world mainly in the US and Europe.

In the twilight, the antique gramophone pink office chair, Christmas tree with the electric lights on, and the Walt Disney-like bronze statue are attached upside down to the floating burned house. One cannot stop feeling a nostalgia for American dreams in 60-70s yet the work also conjures up melancholy as some of the trees are dead and the horse stands lonely next to the canvas without a painter.

This work was inspired by the American artist Fredric Edwin Church and his work Twilight in the wildness. Church was one of the Hudson River School members which was influenced by Romanticism. In Quinn's work, however, the house and objects seem as though not historical but ironic humour and jokes to contemporary society.
Although the work resembles the Church’s painting, it is rather a peculiar phenomenon in which the said objects float in the space where different times intersect. By disorienting viewer’s perception, the work detaches the viewer’s consciousness and ignites different narratives.

The objects imply the rejected past in which a time is suspended. So much so the white horse which symbolises death in Western culture, emptiness and a world at the end become a new chapter of the abandoned past that has not yet to be told.

(Commentary & Translation: Asako Ujita)