Peter O'Kennedy. Over and Over

About

O’Kennedy works across a variety of time-based media, including video, installation, performance and photography. A concern with movement* and duration unites his work. OVER AND OVER presents a collection of single channel videos with its subjects in states of suspension, rotation and repetition. Children swing; pigs rotate; a dog wheels. A passive, fixed camera looks and looks and looks, and keeps looking, as the event cycles before it. The looking is blank; detached; mechanical, but perhaps only as a means of self-defense. Caught in the closed loop generated by the question “what does no meaning mean?,” and empathetic to Samuel Beckett’s notion of man as “non-knower” and “no-can-er,” the artist can only “run the tape one more time,” just in case he stumbles into some form of progression away from the circularity of the question, either inwards towards acceptance or outwards towards resistance.