DUBLIN.- The Irish Museum of Modern Art announced the opening of artist Sam Jury's All Things Being Equal. The work, from the permanent collection of the museum, runs from July 28th to August 23rd in the Project Spaces.

Created in Dublin while Sam Jury was in residency at IMMA All Things Being Equal is a film which explores an intimate event, depicting the repetitive movements of a figure in confinement, beleaguered by water. The work was made from a single shot – filming through one event (the water) to get to another (the moving head), but finding no obvious union. Visually, All Things Being Equal is stripped bare, borrowing from the sparse aesthetic of Samuel Beckett, where naming and style detract from the essential, and negate the potential to manipulate the flow of narrative time. For this purpose, context is without reference, gender unknown and identity removed as the head is shaved. For Beckett both camera and screen embodied ways to perceive and be perceived and his later use of the ‘intrusive camera’ suggested there is no ‘flight from perceivedness’ and, by extension, the paradox of being and not being.

Commenting on the work Jury stated “I’m often pulled back to Beckett’s comment on his work Film where he talks about a ‘flight from perceivedness’, and I think this is so resonant for the age we live in now. Where there is no escape from the camera or the screen that reflects us”.

Jury goes on to state: I can say with confidence whenever I experience Beckett, I understand a little more about what it means to exist. Many people seem to find Beckett’s work dark, or joyless, often oblique, but I find his work full of life - extremely real and honest, and often with great humour - albeit a kind of tragic one

A lecture will be presented on August 12 at 1:00 at IMMA: The unthought and the harrowing: Samuel Beckett’s Necessary Art by distinguished Beckett scholar Derval Tubridy. This lecture explores the intersections between Beckett’s writing and the visual arts and poses questions that are key to Beckett’s prose, poetry and performance which underpin significant moments in contemporary art drawing on the current exhibition by Stan Douglas and the presentation of Sam Jury’s All Things Being Equal. Derval Tubridy is Dean of the Graduate School, Associate Pro-Warden for Research and Enterprise, and Senior Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently writing a monograph on Samuel Beckett’s influence on contemporary aesthetics called Art after Beckett.

Sam Jury's work explores the psychological impact of film-based imagery and examines how its ubiquity shapes our understanding of society and self. Sam Jury is represented by Stephen Haller Gallery of New York.