Ailbhe Ní Bhriain's "Great Good Places IV" borrows its title from the Henry James short story. It draws on the slippage between dream and reality captured in the story and its strange atmosphere – at once mundane and hallucinatory. James's "Great Good Place" is an impossible but obscurely familiar refuge to which the overworked and the overwhelmed find themselves magically transported. This work reimagines a series of generic settings as such sites of suspension and displacement. It uses simple collage devices alongside CGI and chromakeyed elements to combine locations and play with the uncertainty of image-space. In a sense it proposes the image itself as a Great Good Place - a displaced elsewhere and an imaginative escape.
"Great Good Places" has been staged in different contexts, most frequently as a four-screen installation. Each film features its own soundtrack, mixing instrumental and natural sounds. The four films are looped and of varying length, creating a changing soundscape and set of image combinations.
09:28 min, Video & CGI composite, colour, looped, sound by Pádraig Murphy
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News flash: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain wins 2020 Golden Fleece Award
