All Yesterdays Parties -

WORKROOM elsewhere*



All Yesterdays Parties, Carnival, Wexford Street, D2

August 26th 2005

Participants – Linda Quinlan, Lee Welsh, Brian Hegarty, Brian Fay, Stephan Brandes, Una Collins, Naomi Sex, Colin Martin, Deirdre Houlihan, Beatrice O Connoll,Aengus Martin, Julie Martin,Damian Martin, Cora Cummins, Jason Oakley, Jenny Browne, Joe Hanly, Alan Keane, Liam Sharkey,Sean, Deirdre Black, Maureen Cummins, Valerie Early, Monica Cullinane, Sinead McCann, Niamh Looney, Fiona Cummins, Alison Pilkington, Jonathan Hunter

All Yesterdays Parties was an evening to celebrate the uncelebrated, organised by Cora Cummins and Alan Keane as a WORKROOM elsewhere* project.

Artists were invited to create works of art on a white helium balloons. These ‘art-balloons’ were then inflated and installed on the night of ‘All Yesterdays Parties’.

All Yesterday’s Parties aimed to be a collaborative entity of helium balloons customised by many artists – addressing the themes of: art & parties; celebrating the uncelebrated; alternative viewing and presentation strategies for art and even the social / conversational turn in recent visual arts practice.

All Yesterday’s Parties was presented for one night only at a party of the same name (26 August 2005). There was a bar, a DJ and projections of party snap shots and party sequences from cinematic classics.

What was ‘un-celebrated’ was left open to the particpating artists to decise and address. Likewise ‘All Yesterdays’ Parties’ was not a selected show – but the results from an open call for submission mixed with a number of invitations with the hope that there would be many random connections and conflations of ideas, artworks and people.

At this event the party did not compromise the art – and the art did not get in the way of the party. Floating above heads the artworks were safe from harm – the works could be drawn down, accessed and contemplated. And guilt-free, the business of art could be placed temporarily to one side. Neither the art or the party were a pretext for one another, they have got equal billing and the leftover helium provided the last section of entertainment as the balloons were being deflated at the end of a great night.