The Future of the Image

This conversation takes as its stepping off point Jacques Ranciere's collection of essays "The Future of the Image", which examine the place of the image in contemporary art.

McKenzie has pin-pointed in the work of McKeown, Clarke and Conlon an interrogation of imagery that is at once both graphic in tendency yet foregrounded in the materiality of the studio.

The essays in Ranciere's book all originated in the very early years of the 21st century; the internet was still in its infancy and the deluge of imagery we live with now had yet to occur. The conversation will examine where the artists find themselves within all of this, and how their own work contends with new ideas around the future of the image.

Dougal McKenzie is a Lecturer in Painting at Belfast School of Art. He was a member of QSS from 2005 to 2016, Orchid Studios from 2016 to 2017, and PSSquared from 2017 to 2021. He is currently exhibiting at the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2024.

Niamh Clarke, Jonathan Conlon and Sharon McKeown are current studio-holders at QSS, having joined in 2021, 2022 and 2019 respectively. All three are graduates of the Belfast School of Art.

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