Mark O’Kelly’s work explores how certain aesthetic symbols, images, and modes of picturing, can be utilized in ways that encourage the public to accept certain discourses in democratic politics as the norm. Drawing on Italian politics of the 1970s, ‘The Party’, painted in post-boom Ireland, references the partisan nature of party politics and meditates on the language of images used in electioneering to normalize what are often extreme and opposite positions. O’Kelly’s interest also revolves around modes of display such as scaffolding or temporary hoardings and how they are used in exhibition display, municipal restoration and political forms of public address.