John Langan
Title: The Meeting
Artist: John Langan
Date of Work: 2009
Medium: Digital Print on Diabond
Location: Sligo County Council Collection, Ballymote Public Library
The Meeting was created during a public art project which was located in a field near Ballymote from 2008-2009. The project Fóidín Mearbhaill – a field in transition examined the transformation and diversity of rural places. This image is based on one of Gustave Courbet’s most significant paintings The Meeting. The original work depicts a chance encounter of Courbet, his patron Alfred Bruyas and Bruyas’s servant Calas, on a road outside Montpellier. The painting teases the often fraught relationship of painter and private patron and marks in a most compelling way the ambition of the collector, keen to insert his own name, taste and generosity into the history of painting. In Langan’s humorous version of the famous painting we find him returning from a day’s fieldwork. On his way he encounters John Perry TD, politician, local hotelier and businessman. With Perry is Michael Rodgers a loyal supporter and local merchant. The encounter occurs on a road which the artist has re-discovered and excavated at Earlsfield/Carrowcauley. By creating this work the artist teases the relationship between art and politics and the ambition of elected officials to insert their own names, taste and generosity into our cultural history. The photograph was taken by photographer Jim Vaughan. The dog’s name is Jinx.
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John Langan was born Co. Clare in 1967. He studied Sculpture at LSAD From 1992-95. In 2007 he completed a research based MA in Art Education. Titled Transcending the Territory, An artist centred approach to residencies in schools. Theresearch project was the Winner of AIB Supreme County Galway Arts Award for 2005. In 2000 he was awarded the Adjudicator’s Prize for the Claremorris Open (COE) and in 2001 the Dublin Corporation Visual Arts Bursary.
His work has been exhibited both here and abroad. He has been a resident artist on the Artist Work Programme at IMMA and at the Firestation Artists’ Studios. As well as several Artist in the Community Residency Awards and Arts Council Bursaries he has been selected for the Artist-in Prisons Panel and a Department of Foreign Affairs Bursary.
Since 2002 he has lived in east Galway where he is Chairman of the local Community Council. In partnership with his community he is actively engaged in exploring and clarifying the issues and concerns that effect their everyday life of this rural district. He is committed for the foreseeable future to being an artist in this community and investigating the effects of this process.
As such his artistic work tends to be a series of interventionist and infiltratist explorations that often involve activities of a social or contextual nature. Through his artistic activities and undertakings he advocates the concept of an engaged practice which stretches beyond how artists personally create, to how they might share with others the creative processes of art making. Much of his artistic work combines visible and invisible artworks. In his role as a formal educator he practices at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology where he is currently Course tutor for the Year One BAAD programme.