Eamon O'Kane's richly productive project AKA: After Kafka's Amerika has generated a profusion of art works in a range of media that includes painting, photography and video. Famously, Franz Kafka relied on secondary source material when writing his novel, Amerika, as he never actually visited the USA. In keeping with this preference for imaginative projection over recorded experience AKA, the video is prefaced by a cautionary epigraph from the critic Jonathan Culler: 'Things are never expected to be real; rather things are read as signs of themselves, idealized and often frustrated.'
Eamon O'Kane's richly productive project AKA: After Kafka's Amerika has generated a profusion of art works in a range of media that includes painting, photography and video. Famously, Franz Kafka relied on secondary source material when writing his novel, Amerika, as he never actually visited the USA. In keeping with this preference for imaginative projection over recorded experience AKA, the video is prefaced by a cautionary epigraph from the critic Jonathan Culler: 'Things are never expected to be real; rather things are read as signs of themselves, idealized and often frustrated.' There follows a dizzying sequence of static snapshots, which takes the viewer on a rollercoaster ride from the heart of America's great cities to the breathtaking expanses of its desert wildernesses. A number of these snapshots have also been excerpted from this sequence and are presented as lone images, inviting a more contemplative form of address on the viewer's part. O'Kane has also produced an extensive series of small acrylic paintings derived from a mixture of sources inspired by kafka's novel, including images culled from books and the internet, taking us even further afield from any notion of precisely recorded reality.'
Dr Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, 2005