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VISUAL ART: IN HER exhibition at the Limerick City Gallery, A Place to Stay, Gillian Kenny shows work about holiday destinations, the promise of escape and the experience of travelling and being away.
Her paintings, crisply and expertly made, draw on postcard imagery going as far back at the mid-20th century, and her own photographs, taken during travels in the United States and Canada, and of places much closer to her own home in Limerick. Her paintings take on board the visual language of the postcard, rather than revisiting the places depicted. What interests her is the way places are represented and idealised as sites of pleasure. There is a kind of innocence about the earlier postcards, for example, dating from the first flush of modern mass tourism, in which iconic destinations – the Italian Riviera, Venice, even Blackpool – are imbued with exoticism.
