Dreams of Longing, Dreams of Regret

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

This body of work was shot in Braddock, a town once known as the “cradle of Western Pennsylvania’s steel industry,”before suffering from its collapse in the 1980s. Throughout Doherty’s career his work engages with the landscape as it looks today while understanding it is both a repository for the memories of past experiences and a witness to the ravages of socio-economic change.

Doherty’s approach and process is speculative. Often taking an existing image or other information as a starting point, he then proceeds to see what can be discovered or found in a location. These photographs of Pennsylvania extend Doherty’s interest in the relationship between landscape and memory and working in locations that bear the traces of contested histories and narratives; some forgotten, some half remembered. The work was first shown at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh in the exhibition of Irish art ‘so it is’ in April 2017.

Since the 1980s, Willie Doherty has been a pioneering figure in contemporary art, film and photography. His works typically begin as responses to his native city of Derry, and the impact and legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles. They are complex reflections on how we look at such locations – or on the stories that might be told about their hidden histories. From early conceptual photo-text works – focusing on the impossibility of establishing any ‘objective’ perspective on this territory – to serial works in film and photography that set contradictory points of view against each other, Doherty reviews familiar places from alternative positions. Doherty has exhibited in many of the world’s leading museums, including the CAM Gulbenkian, Lisbon; Museum De Pont, Tilburg; IMMA, Dublin; SMK, Copenhagen; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Tate, London; Modern Art Oxford; Dallas Museum of Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Neue Galerie, Kassel; Kunsthalle Bern; Kunstverein München; Kunstverein Hamburg and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. He was nominated twice for the Turner Prize and has participated in major international exhibitions including Documenta, Manifesta, the Carnegie International, and the Venice, São Paulo and Istanbul Biennales.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

pigment print

Artist

Willie Doherty (1959 - )

Title

Dreams of Longing, Dreams of Regret

Edition

Number 2 in an edition of 3

Date

2017

Medium

5 pigment prints

Dimensions

(each) height: 67.7cm; width: 101.0; depth: 3.7 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Kerlin Gallery as part of the Northern Ireland Centenary, March 2021

Provenance

The artist; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 31 March 2021

GAC number

18986