On Seeing Only Totally New Things
Designed by David Smith and Oran Day at Atelier David Smith
Print and Production: MM Art Book Print and Repro
On Seeing only Totally New Things presents the art practice and recent exhibition history of artist Gavin Murphy. These disparate elements are woven around a common thread of research in to the IMCO Building (designed by British architect Oliver P. Bernard) widely regarded as a highpoint in Irish Modernist architecture. Murphy’s recent exhibitions are extensively documented alongside supporting texts from critics Ellen Crowley and curator Patrick T. Murphy, amongst others, which assists the reader in connecting the threads of practice, research and modern Irish architecture.
Murphy's film Something New Under the Sun which focuses on his research into Bernard and the IMCO building is generously presented. The visual conceit of a book-within-a-book – essentially a brief biography of Bernard – provides a simple pause between the collection of ephemera, artefacts, and photographed texts around the subject of the buildings design, its use and latterly it's destruction. Finally the book closes with a visual index which includes correspondence, bibliographic sources, custom type designs produced for Murphy's art practice and annotated sketches of the doomed HMS Lusitania, which Bernard produced designs for.
