Leon Nevill Gallagher
"Cargo"

Exhibition: 16 February – 11 March 2023

Online life is both an extension of traditional social interactions and a radical departure from it. It is a place where we seek out stories, people, and knowledge – but it’s also a place that distorts and limits those interactions. Around the time of beginning this body of work, myself and my girlfriend were no longer living near each other. A natural thread within this project emerged visualising the feeling arising as we uphold relationships through a sterile looking-glass, distorting the sense for what is human and what is digital.

Developed as part of Photo Museum Ireland’s Early Career Artist Award, Cargo visualises the non-place that exists between people and online communication. A space where the subtleties of body language, touch and sound are lost or at the very least compressed. This ongoing body of work focuses on the unseen, playing with memory, imaginary data and visual documentation, exploring the spaces where online communication becomes the third party and mediator in the dialogue of a relationship.

Leon Nevill Gallagher is a contemporary Irish photographer and artist living in Berlin. His practice lies in conceptualising the space between people and technology, creating documents reflecting on the emotional and physical shift occurring as the surface of our interpersonal needs reposition themselves towards the digital. Leon refers to his work as hybrid ‘documentary’, yet it lies in a realm where documentary ends and narrative begins, drawing from fact and fiction to realise a synthetic reality that exists in-between. This approach requires the artist to consider the medium of photography itself as part of the process of uncovering, rather than a means to an end.