Mike Absalom – “Me Dream’s Out!” (A Liverpool Irish Mirage). Exhibition 23 October – 27 November 2008
Images of myth and reality around the Scotland Road by County Mayo painter and print maker Mike Absalom.
Following his exhibition “My Irish Eyes on Liverpool” in 2007 and a subsequent show “The Peninsula” in May 2008 Irish artist Mike Absalom returns to the View Two Gallery with a provocative series of new paintings entitled “Me Dream’s Out” (A Liverpool Irish Mirage).
Chasing the illusion of identity through his Anglo-Irish family past Mike Absalom meditates on the Liverpool Irish, and asks himself if the culture mix that has evolved so individually in this city has any relevance to his own journey.
“Here are paintings of men drinking, fighting, playing, working. There are docks and dark courts and tenements and shining public edifices. Here are women looking after their children, or dancing or playing musical instruments, or praying, or just there to serve, or to be beaten or bought. There is worship and defiance, joy and depression, despair and death. Do they express Ireland or England or do we look, between Scotland Road and the Cim, at a human island all of its own self, and apart from that, universal? And is there after all, such a thing as identity, or is it just a sign pointing the way home to those for whom it is unbearable to be only oneself? This, alone, perhaps is an excuse for a punch-up.” Mike Absalom