Dennis McNulty’s I’m Getting Parts at Oonagh Young Gallery
You’re going to need to pull those polypropylene straps but now’s not the time. You’ll find these attached below three strips of large bright red structures hanging from the wall. They may resemble inflatable life-saving devices, but are actually hand-bent acrylic, hard and glassy and they aren’t going to save anyone. On a screen to your left dirt-covered earthworms twist on a white table while an animated torus turns slowly, crimson to purple. The worms cross each other looking for purchase against a smooth resistant surface that just won’t give.
Across the room an old carousel projector sits squat on a concrete block, don’t worry that this is controlled from a LoRa base station or even what that means, just relax, read the words on the wall, I ain’t finished yet, you know about a worm that’s cut…growin’ whole again? These words will change to others, given time, like everything else. This isn’t just some machine to machine stream that goes in under the skin cleanly, like security clearance of your self-regulated perimeter dreams. Your lanyard awaits hanging from red straps on the wall, with a device flickering wildly, red patterns of dots blinking, then changing with a click. It’s sufficiently protected by an anti-static bag against any forecasted crisis, protected too like the small screen hanging on the opposite wall, showing dimensions that grow and shrink. There is danger of over-saturation between the collapsing cells of what used to be the street flowing outside and the entire length of your body. Take a breath. Take another. It doesn’t need you. Forget about the cut.
It doesn’t need you to TRY IT, to download your response before all systems come undone and it’s not going to save what you think is you. Can you feel the pulsing of dots engulfing your fractured future, trying to find a way through? I ain’t finished yet.