Cargo
Leon Nevill Gallagher
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.
Cargo explores 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 in between friends and partners, where online communication becomes the third party and mediator in the dialogue of a relationship.
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.
Leon is a contemporary Irish lens-based artist, living in Berlin. His practice lies in conceptualising the space between people and communicative technology, creating documents reflecting on the emotional and physical shift occurring as the surface of our communicational needs reposition themselves. Leon refers to his work as a hybrid ‘documentary’ form, drawing from fact and fiction to realise a reality that exists in-between.