Sociodesic: A space for the three great loves

Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick St Until May 29 091-565886

Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick St Until May 29 091-565886

George Bolster is an Irish artist, based in New York, who has a singularly inventive way of looking at contemporary ideas about cultural identity and allegiance in the light of archaic systems of belief and meaning. He also views pop and street cultural signifiers as being just as important and valid as notionally more profound expressions of identity.

All that makes Bolster sound heavyweight and perhaps overly theoretical, but his work is graphic and engaging and shot through with humour.

One of his two installations for this show, Space of the Three Great Loves, is inspired by the teachings of “The Church of Spiritual Equality”, initiated, Bolster notes, by “Groeg E Bretslo in California in the mid-1960s”. It takes the form of a geodesic dome, a nod to what Bolster describes as Bretslo’s obsession with Buckminster Fuller’s architectural ideas, and features a modular chapel “for the marriage of Heterosexuals, Homosexuals and Lesbian couples”. Appropriately, it is covered in images evocative of 1960s utopian ideas.

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Aidan Dunne

Aidan Dunne

Aidan Dunne is visual arts critic and contributor to The Irish Times