The Art Ambulance pulled up in Beach Grove, off Beach Avenue on a pleasant evening in September and projected three movies on the screen on the front wall for guests at number 5, the home of the Curator Tony Strickland.

The Art Ambulance is a 1973 Ford Custom Ambulance that is now owned by the director and projectionist Andrew Manson, who with Tony Strickland travels to art events and festivals showing pictures of both the still and moving kind.

It began when Tony Strickland was asked by film maker David Dunne to help launch a film about his experience in Bangkok so the movie was screened from the Ambulance in Beach Grove to an invited audience.

Tony Strickland and Andrew Manson recently travelled to the Kilkenny Arts Festival, where the public viewed the exhibits, some painted by Andrew. Tony Strickland has brought on board artists from his time working in the Hallward Gallery in Merrion Square over the last few years.

Tony is the sociable kind and during the Summer he likes to get some friends together for a garden party and this has now fused with a film show from the Art Ambulance.

The event began with a film by Kelly O’Connor. Kelly is an Irish video artist also working in photography and drawing. She is the director of Sprawl Studios and a member of Moxie Dublin Art Collective. Her film ‘Marbulus Interuptus’ is part of the mortgage series, an on-going project about the impending demolition of the artist’s childhood home due to the redevelopment of the land. This piece deals with the wider impact of a building project and being forced to move (4.20 mins).

This was followed by a work by Andrew Manson, who is currently completing his final year in the National Film School. His work has been shown at the Galway Film Fleadh, the RDS Student Art Awards exhibition and is part of the Kilkenny Arts Week.

Andrew says that his work “is centered on the search for what Werner Herzog described as the elastic truth, my path in finding this form is often abstracted as I impose different amounts of manipulative chaos into the process.” The film from him called ‘Rockfield’ is a paranoiac and delusional journey through physical and mental realms. The story takes place in an old dilapidated building where four friends re-unite for a final sending off (13 mins).

The final film was by David Dunne, who helped inspire the Art Ambulance. He is a Dublin-based filmmaker and sculptor. David studied at Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design and the Johnson Atelier Institute of Sculpture in New Jersey.

This year he has been selected again for the EV+A exhibition in Limerick and the RHA annual show as well as the Boyle Arts festival. His film ‘Immersion’ attempts to deal with several different issues such as religion, immortality, consumerism and the human condition drawn from life in Bangkok.

Above: Tony Strickland and Andrew Manson with the Art Ambulance, which Andrew says “has a role in art being there to rescue sick art.”