Drawing on his long-standing interest in the symbolic apparatus of state power and the semiotics of ceremony, Ivers turns his attention to the 1932 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin—a moment when the Irish Free State staged itself on a global platform. With an eye attuned to irony and spectacle, he excavates fragments of mediated memory, juxtaposing archival material with contemporary visual languages to reframe the political theatre of the past.

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Taking its name from a newspaper description of the sea and sky as the Papal Legate approached Dun Laoghaire aboard the SS Cambria—flanked by Saorstat Army planes in the shape of a cross—A cobalt sea and above it a cobalt sky reads like a scene storyboarded for a nationalist epic. Instead, Ivers offers us a coolly detached, visually seductive counter-narrative, one that interrogates the aesthetics of belief and the manufactured sublime.

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In the spirit of his earlier projects, which spliced Cold War paranoia with pulp culture, here too the theatrical cohabits with the bureaucratic. Expect monochrome prints, military formations, coded gestures, commemorative ephemera: a visual essay in command and control.

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This is not history painting, nor simply a meditation on nostalgia. It is closer to cultural forensics—an artist's attempt to prise apart the scaffolding of memory from the spectacle of myth. In Ivers' world, iconography is never innocent.

About the Artist

Austin Ivers is an artist and educator based in Ireland, where he lectures in Contemporary Art at Atlantic Technological University, Galway. He has exhibited extensively across Ireland, Europe and the US, including shows at the RHA, 126 Gallery, the Dock, as well as in Graz, Kiev, Friedrichshafen, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. His work has appeared in the VAI Printed Project and Enclave Papers, and continues to reflect a deep engagement with the interplay between technology, memory and the machineries of cultural production.