For his fourth exhibition at Matt’s Gallery Willie Doherty presents a new video work, Retraces, shown on seven monitors, and a related group of large scale photographs.

Like much of Doherty’s work Retraces is shot in locations in the north of Ireland. The static camera both recalls Doherty’s interest in surveillance technologies and the Romantic tradition of the landscape. However, we are not presented with one fixed viewpoint. Our attention shifts from day to night, between the city and the surrounding landscape, from panoramic to close-up. Events slow down and speed up. Nothing is static.

The camera/character in Retraces seems to lose the way, stray off the path. We end up in dead ends. Subtitles offer little respite or guidance and open up more possibilities and narratives. Repetition takes us back over old ground, returning to familiar places, retracing footsteps in an effort to rediscover what is lost. We struggle to recall the details, to re-invent the past in an attempt to progress to the future.

Doherty’s photographs of these dead spaces/spaces of the dead challenge us to reconsider our own implication in his subjects and in his narratives. Just as the ‘voice’ of the subtitles, which accompany the video sequences, cannot be determined, so too do Doherty’s photographs force us to look again at images we can no longer trust.

This exhibition has been generously supported by The Henry Moore Foundation with additional support from The University of Ulster, Belfast.