Tim O'Riley's work stems from his continuing exploration of digital technology, and the shared territory between painting, photography and film. Each of the works exhibited in Flip Side, whether a unique print, an animated DVD sequence or a small repeated image seen through a stereoviewer, jars our usual perspective on the most everyday of objects and throws the viewer's relationship to them into question.
In Three and two (diamonds), there are five cards, some upturned with their faces and suits in view and others hidden. Each hand dealt has the potential to be a royal flush, a guaranteed winner for the cardholder, but the unturned cards remain a mystery. Hovering in a state of suspended animation, the cards represent the moment of anticipation - of holding one's breath - suggesting possibilities rather than actualities. It might be the beginning of the hand, or it could be the disappointed moment at the end of the game, when the unlucky gambler throws them into the air in exasperation. The dice, an object frequently featured in O'Riley's images, also embodies the element of chance, the thrill of risk-taking and of never knowing the outcome of the throw.
O'Riley plays with ordinary, prosaic objects: a deck of cards, a set of dice, paper and model planes. He chooses items that are often associated with leisurely games or past-times, those that mark the passing of time in an unrestrained way. By utilising some of the new technologies of computer-based media in his work, O'Riley sets the objects into motion in endless repetitive loops or freezes them in a still frame, suggesting the effects of chance and time. He distorts the familiarity of the objects and offers a different viewpoint from which they can be viewed. The significance of O'Riley's digitally generated prints and DVDs is found in this alternative perspective, one that emphasises the relativity of our relationship to objects, and the narrowing gap between reality and illusion.
Tim O'Riley recently participated in Signatures of the Invisible, a collaboration between contemporary artists and the physicists at the CERN laboratories in Geneva. The resulting work was exhibited at Atlantis Gallery, London and is touring to the Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva and the Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon. Previous exhibitions include Printmaking and the Computer at Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. Tim O'Riley studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design. This will be his first solo exhibition at Houldsworth.
