Strontium Dogs takes its name from the Starlord comic strip (later in 2000AD). The exhibition surveys Austin Ivers'

investigation into how culture reflects societal anxiety, focusing on ideas around modernism, automotive design, and

alienation. Incorporating Mad Max camera angles, Baader-Meinhof style, and abandoned man-made spaces, the work

suggests an era when the Cold War's impending threat loomed over both the bleak cultural landscape of Ireland and the

optimism of the USA.

Ivers was also thinking about the parapolitical conflict waged between the superpowers, not with military threat but with

cultural and social weapons. While a ridiculous nuclear stockpile lay dormant and the Cold War was waged in the Third

World, the clash of civilisations took place on newsstands, in cinemas, in bookshops, on TV, and on tape decks. While the

CIA funded 'Encounter' magazine and facilitated the promotion of Abstract Expressionism and the USSR marketed itself

as the home of security and equality through the World Peace Council, popular culture responded with the novels of John

Le Carré, the films of Roger Corman and James Cameron, 'Threads', 'Quatermass', and 'V' on TV, and with This Heat,

Billy Bragg, The Redskins, and Frankie on our stereos. This is the work that informed this exhibition.

The cultural representations of the end of the world all reflect the existential anxieties of the time and are thus locked in at

the point of production but often have a tail: 'Global Thermonuclear War' is a game presented to Matthew Broderick in

1983's War Games, a Disney movie for kids that considers the pointlessness of mutually assured destruction and how one

might teach that to an AI by comparing it to 'X's & O's'. This stark choice is reflected in the stark representation of the

work, vinyl on unpainted plaster, listing the options on the way to the end: Bridge... Poker... Global Thermonuclear War.

'Strontium Dogs', a sequence of 4 standard definition videos presented on CRT surveillance monitors (previously owned

by the British West Midlands Police), presents newer and older works, unfinished and literally cut up. These reflect a Cold

War aesthetic, specific ideas around Modernism, engineering, architecture, design, and spy films, yet still remain in the

'video installation' world, rather than the film/proscenium world.

In the pre-war period, Modernism expressed itself through extremist politics, heightened self-aggrandisement via World's

Fairs and the Olympics, late colonial adventurism, and capitalist expansion. Ireland, barely a decade free, celebrated the

1500th anniversary of the arrival of St Patrick with the 31st International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. While ocean

liners clogged the capital's quays, acting as hotels for the thousands of international clergy present, and many masses were

held in Dublin, the final public mass in Phoenix Park reputedly attracted over 1 million congregants, including a live radio

link-up with Pope VI and necessitating the establishment of Radio Athlone (previously 2RN and subsequently Radió

Éireann, RTE) and a parallel edition of the Irish Independent. One issue of this includes a whole-page photo captioned

'Dublin's greeting to the papal legate. The SS Cambria, on which the Papal Legate travelled from Holyhead approaching

Dun Laoghaire with its escort of Saorstat Army aeroplanes in the form of a cross.'

The development of atomic and nuclear power has always existed in conjunction with nuclear weapons: the promise of

cheap, clean, easy power coupled with potentially unlimited destructive possibility! At its peak, a hydrogen explosion will

reach 100 million degrees Celsius, five times that of the centre of the sun. Simultaneously, research continues into the

potentially endless and self-sustaining fusion reaction, the power of the endless sun.