Erfahrung
David O’Mara

Erfrahrung was made in 2012, the photographs were all taken on one building site in Pimlico, London. O’Mara had taken them while working as a painter on site with a small 35mm camera. The book is a repurposed art book with hand printed fibre based prints attached to the pages. Produced in an edition of three. (source: direct correspondence with the artist)

David O’Mara is an Irish artist based in London and Kent. A graduate of Waterford Institute of Technology and the National College of Art and Design in Dublin (Sculpture and Art History), O’Mara has won awards and participated in exhibitions in Ireland and the UK. O’Mara’s artistic practice is concerned with the unwanted and the rejected; he is fascinated by the visual detritus of the urban environment. Over the years O’Mara has been selectively collecting the unwanted fragments that litter the streets of modern cities, because he sees the ubiquitous waste of the consumer society as the residue of an overburdened visual culture. The rate at which visual images are generated has reached unprecedented levels, and the means of their projection permeates the very fabric of the urban environment. The sheer magnitude of this industry has exceeded the very perceptual capacities of the city dwellers, the target audience, while the incessant bombardment prevents all but a tiny volume to be consumed as intended.
This has resulted in huge swathes of surplus material, disposable media generating endless streams of excess visual material for which there is no use-value. The acknowledgement of this phenomenon precipitated a crisis in O’Mara’s own working practice, and he struggled to justify his activity when it would only contribute to this confusion of visual messages. This predicament has informed the artist’s interpretation of the found images which he continues to collect in the urban environment.