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2006

From where I stand

March 7, 2014 admin

Art Trail, Cork

September 21 – October 1, 2006

David Beattie, Conor Harrington, Mark McCullough, CT’ink , Karski, Ono Poiesz, Tom Campbell, Doireann O’Malley

From Where I Stand is an exhibition that explores the notion of identity and public space. The intention is to construct a real and imagined landscape in the realm of the public space resulting in an alternative space that co-exists with the everyday. Art Trail invited artists to respond to the dynamics of the Shandon area as a space/place. Shandon is one of Cork’s most familiar sections and one of it’s best loved. Rich in heritage, it is defined by the Shandon Bells and its winding streets. The streets have a distinctive narrative history of their own but like all narratives about place it changes over time.

When we talk of globalisation as involving some kind of loss, it seems that this loss is to do with place, and the loss of identity. According to Michel De Certeau, globalisation is impelled by a sense of place. He views the experience of the city as partly an experience of wanting change. The current homogenization of our streetscapes is a direct result of this global experience and has resulted in a lack of engagement with our surroundings. Our urban landscape is becoming indistinguishable from any other. Increasing cultural amnesia needs visiting, with a need for the public to linger on or explore the notion of public space as interactive. Shandon’s distinctive streetscape is an integral part of the city’s identity and is currently undergoing its own transformation.

The visual aspect of this year’s Art Trail will primarily take the form of an outdoor exhibition, utilising blank hoardings and disused house fronts as a point of departure. There will also be an indoor element using the Shandon Bells and the Firkin Crane as an exhibition space of video and photography Engaging with public art involves more than objects received passively as in a gallery/museum space- it may open a dialogue with its audience, drawing them together to consider issues, which are wider than the aesthetic. Public art is concerned with contributing to the quality of the imaginative life of the environment. This is a central to this exhibition.

Graffiti-Art is the most common form of public ‘art’, and acts as a site-specific installation in the urban infrastructure. It transforms streets into real-life galleries, through the manipulation and reclamation of public space. It positions itself as a social indicator, describing or expressing the collective aspects of our existence through the documenting of a moment in time. Its ephemeral nature means that it exists for a short period before it is sabotaged or erased. The intention of the exhibition is to draw attention to public spaces and to alter/question/redefine/stimulate the visual landscape.

David Beattie was born in Northern Ireland. As a multi-disciplinary artist his work involves installation, performance, video, and photography. Place, identityand the social interaction with one’s environment play a central role in the formation of the work. Wallball (2006) utilises the repetitive nature of kicking a ball against a wall to examine notions of boundaries, partitions, and enclosures.

Mark McCullough: Inspired by street art, his work makes a fast and immediate visual impact on the viewer. By placing the artwork in the context of advertising, one’s expectations of the contemporary urban-scape are unsettled, encouraging a re-evaluation of the use of public space which is all too often dominated by imposing corporate advertising.

CT’ink is the group name of Evol and Pisa73. Both based in Berlin, they share a studio and have shown widely throughout Europe.

CT’ink are best known for their complex, highly detailed, multi-layered stencils. Their work is a commentary on everyday life in a superficial and style-oriented environment. The tone varies between sarcastic/ironic and serious. The subjects of their paintings, as well as the range of materials employed, show CT’ink’s love for absurdities and overlooked items. Old wood, bulky waste, and cardboard are among their favorites. Most pieces are painted with a mixture of spray cans, markers, wall paint and pencils.

Evol (1972) earned a degree in product design at HFG Schwaebisch Gmuend. Pisa73 (1973) studied visual communication at FHG Pforzheim. Both artists work as freelance designers. www.evoltaste.com – www.pisa73

Harrington is interested in the transient aspect of graffiti and draws parallels between these urban traces and human migration. Within the work this manifests in the way which Harrington treats the figure. In contrast to the smooth realism, large areas seem to be receding or being erased which creates a dialogue between presence and absence.

Conor Harrington is represented by Laseridez Gallery, London. His next solo show will be in November of this year. Harrington will also participate in the BLKMRKT Annual, L.A. in early 2007.

Karski Is from the Netherlands. He studied graphic design for four year and fine art for five, later founding his own design studio. Nowadays he works as a freelancer, using different techniques and influences. His stencils are used lavishly, with different stencils for several colors, and he often dedicates his pictures to certain topics, such as dead rap artists or missing children.

2010

Blasphemy

March 7, 2014 admin

Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin / The Dock, Carrick on Shannon

Co-curated Oonagh Young & Mary Cremin

January 29 – February 27,2010

David Godbold, Factotum, Nevan Lehart , Paul Murnahan

Screening: Rocky road to Dublin

From 1 January 2010, blasphemy is a crime in Ireland punishable by a €25,000 fine. The law states that blasphemy is committed when a person

“publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion.” This law has provided an extremely dangerous international precedent. The exact wording on blasphemous libel contained in this Defamation Act is being used by Pakistan to seek a “defamation of religion” law through the UN. Irish legislation is being used to legitimise the proposals of Pakistan and the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Conference) to establish defamation of religion as a principle of international law.

Ireland voted with all other EU countries against a resolution on “combating defamation of religion” at the UN last December. Explaining that vote, Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin said:

“We believe that the concept of defamation of religion is not consistent with the promotion and protection of human rights. It can be used to justify arbitrary limitations on, or the denial of, freedom of expression. Indeed, Ireland considers that freedom of expression is a key and inherent element in the manifestation of freedom of thought and conscience and as such is complementary to freedom of religion or belief.” “One man’s blasphemy is another man’s comedy classic,” the Irish Examiner editorial remarked. Is it that simple? Images considered blasphemous have changed over the centuries. But the response has not. Eliciting extreme reactions from particular sections of society has resulted in much work being destroyed and many artists banished down through the ages. It is clear to see that images considered ‘blasphemous’ still stir very deep and dangerous emotions such as the The Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005.  What makes an image Blasphemous? In what contexts are they considered sacrilegious or immoral? Is the introduction of this new legislation in Ireland an indication of a tolerant, pluralist and democratic society befitting of our times? The artists in this exhibition address the issue directly through their individual practices or have already confronted censorship of their work.

David Godbold is interested in the ‘conflation of grand themes and daily minutiae’. Here he presents a cluster of crucifixes (13 in total); overlaying redundant notes, lists, leaflets and official documents with religious imagery and wry captions. Godbold considers the language of suffering creating trenchant satire through ironic political commentary.  The Vacuum (produced by the arts organisation Factotum formed by Stephen Hackett and Richard West) published two issues simultaneously on the themes of God and Satan. Two weeks later, the City Council debated the contents of these papers with some councillors accusing Factotum of ‘encouraging devil worshiping’. This started a process of debates culminating in the Council disregarding legal advice and demanding that Factotum apologise to them and the citizens of Belfast. To lampoon the Council’s demand, Factotum held a Sorry Day and published a special Sorry Issue of The Vacuum. The three issues and newspaper clippings are on display in the exhibition. Paul Murnaghan presents ‘Map of the Empire’ which originated from Murnaghan’s utopian project ‘Neocredo’ (2008) where he traveled extensively in Europe posing a question through various media, ’if you had the opportunity to compose the opening line of a universal hymn, what would it be and how would you sing it’? Here he adds random material and imposes opinion where once was objectivity. Where blasphemy may be truly present, is in the casual misrepresentation and disregard for stated beliefs through the overlaying of various answers.

For Nevan Lahart materiality and the transforming nature of his art renders his made-objects absurd and potent. The visceral energy in his work reinforces the irony transmitted through his juxtaposition of materials and wit. Lahart is one of Ireland’s most innovative artists, defying the norms of display and challenging spaces with his physicality. He is currently showing in the RHA with A Lively Start to a Dead End.

With the kind permission of the director Peter Lennon, Rocky Road to Dublin (1967) will be screened alongside The Making of Rocky Road (2005) on Wednesday 10th February at 7pm in the gallery. There was a de facto ban on this documentary for over 30 years in Ireland because it argues that Ireland was dominated by cultural isolationism, primarily Gaelic and clerical traditionalism. Shot by French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Lennon asks: “What do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it?”

2007

Sheltering Daydreams

March 7, 2014 admin

325 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, New York

May, 2007

Sonia Shiel, Martin Healy, Vivienne Griffin , Francesco Simeti

This group show will explore the relationship between contemporary artistic practices and the notion of ‘ Home’. The use of houses for art exhibitions has become atypical and tactical, as an exhibition site it makes a visible connection between art and home as it relates to lived experience. The unconscious process of the artist that exists outside language will reveal the contentious nature of the home as a place of protected intimacy while also signifying a site of alienation and displacement.

Our altered notion of ‘home’ is a symptom and expression of a new and historically original dilemma where double-lives are led, within our culture of migration and dwelling within the diaspora. Home becomes an imagined place or a fictitiously remembered or half remembered place that people want to exist, but it survives almost entirely in memory. It becomes a site for sheltering daydreams, for a lost time. If Heidegger considered the world as the ‘house in which mortals dwell’, Bachelard in ‘The poetics of space’ will say the same of the image and memory of the house, which constitutes its own poetic place-world. The House has become a paradoxical entity. As a home, it is ‘our first universe’ and our ‘first world’. Transcending our memories of the houses, which we have inhabited, our ‘first world’ is one of protected intimacy. Our imagination recreates this intimacy in spaces that provide the slightest shelter.

House Project proposes to capitalize on a professional peer network that pools individual and combined resources to create an arsenal of inter-disciplinary discourse between practitioners and audiences. It is a multi disciplinary project composed of 7 events taking place in 5 venues across Ireland, one in New York and one in London that advocate the appreciation of an ‘art-local’ audience. In its selection of practices, all exceeding the confines of the gallery, it is interested in creating a play between the private and the public. Hence mobilizing the site as a discursive narrative and generating alternative spatial and temporal relations between the artist, site, work, and audience.

Subverting roles and their subsequent hierarchies House Project will address major concerns and trends in current agendas of contemporary practice and will question the idea of its audience and encounter. In every event there will be a combination of International and Irish artists, critics and curators on board, elevating Irish artists to an international level and developing an international audience for Irish Art. It will culminate in a significant publication – funded by the Arts Council -documenting each event with accompanying texts, which will address the ephemeral works and venues of this once off project, which carries the propensity to develop the identities of all its participants.

House Projects is co-ordinated by Sonia Shiel, Mary Cremin and Gavin Murphy

2012

Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection

March 7, 2014 admin

Irish Museum of Modern Art

February 22 – May 20, 2012

Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection comprises more than 100 photographs drawn from the renowned Bank of America Collection. The exhibition documents the evolution of photography since the 1850s and presents some of the most notable photographers of the 19th and 20th-centuries. Hand-picked from thousands of photographs, the works are displayed so as to create “conversations” between images by individual artists and across a wide range of themes, including portraits, landscapes, street photography and abstraction.

The exhibition presents works by some of photography’s most celebrated names, from 19th-century innovators Gustave Le Gray, Julia Margaret Cameron and Carleton Watkins, via 20th-century luminaries: Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, and Irving Penn, to contemporary image makers: William Eggleston, Thomas Ruff and Cindy Sherman. Modern works are juxtaposed with older works, European with American, and staged subjects with documentary images. These conversations create unique visual groupings, including images of visitors responding to art in museums, such as Thomas Struth’s Audience 4 (2004), which shows people gazing upward at Michelangelo’s statue of David at the Academia Gallery in Florence, and Musée du Louvre 4, Paris (1989), where visitors contemplate Théodore Géricault’s famous Raft of the Medusa in a Louvre gallery.

Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection is made possible by the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Art in our Communities Programme™. The exhibition was originally curated by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, travelled to the Museo del Novecento in Milan, and has now been re-interpreted by the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Biography

Mary Cremin

December 19, 2013 admin

Projects

info@marycremin.com

December 7, 2013 admin

2013, Curating

Sonia Shiel, Misadventure Seeks Rainy Afternoon

November 18, 2013 admin

Sonia Shiel’s work is vested in fictional and non-fictional narratives that are illustrated through painting, video and animated sculptures, the works are inherently painterly and explore the materiality of paint. The exhibited works serve as storyboards where the singular image becomes indicative of a larger story. Pitching base, human aspirations to survive against their odds, idyllic scenes of industry, nature and society are underscored with the preposterous violence, inflated caricature and infatiguable resilience of cartoons. Set in ungoverned, fictional or lawless environments; the wild west; the high seas; the animal kingdom and so on – Shiel’s protagonists in their various well intentioned pursuits, are confronted by nature, mortality, chance and systemic obstacles of their own creation.

Much of Shiel’s work has been influenced by various traditions of storytelling. Misadventure Seeks Rainy Afternoon sees the introduction of legal narratives into her practice, the questioning of human ethics and how law creates a code that determines what is moral and immoral are subjects that are brought to the fore. Following its often perverted course, a series of painted works draw on the impotency of justice against the natural world. We have an innate ability to make moral assessments when faced with certain situations, Shiel’s works posits scenario’s where we make evaluative judgements becoming at once both judge and jury based on our own established moral code. The misadventure is to allow for only one reading or outcome.

2013, Curating

Bring in the Noise

October 20, 2013 admin

Ormston House, Limerick

October 24 – November,23, 2013

David Beattie (Irl), Laura Buckley (Irl), Alexander Gutke (SW).

Ormston House in partnership with Limerick City Gallery of Art, will present Bring in the Noise curated by Mary Cremin. The exhibition focuses on artist’s whose practice engage with and appropriate technology creating assemblages and installations. Each of the artist’s works tends to investigate the everyday through science, technology, and mathematics. The works appeal to our natural desire to understand what surrounds us through visuals, sound and objects. The sound element of the works inhabit the space interacting with each other, creating a soundscape that is both playful and individual to each of the works

David Beattie’s pieces Auto-rock, 2013 and Erratic, 2013 combines Beattie’s interest in low fidelity sound and organic movements. The rock an inanimate object becomes a means to interrupt and determine the sound of the rotating record. The piece Erratic a 360-degree documentation of a rock in the landscape reflects on movement and our viewing of the elemental in the landscape, it echoes the rotation of the record player in Auto-rock and the repetitious voice punctuates its movement. The piece 12.8hz, 2011 is a sculptural work that emits a sound that is inaudible to the human ear. These works highlights Beattie’s preoccupation with the intermediary moments where physics, philosophy, technology and nature collide. The low fi nature of his works and the simplicity with which these objects are presented create a dynamic interplay between the relationship of the object and it becoming something other.

Laura Buckley’s, ZigZag (The Magic Know-How), 2013 is a projection of a visual landscape documenting the everyday objects that she comes into contact with, both inside and outside of the studio. Buckley manipulates footage interplaying it with images creating a texture and color that are both saturated and visually arresting. The mirrored structure allows for the images to expand and contract, the ambient sound of the work creates a rhythm to the visuals that accentuates the movement within the piece and the splicing of static and moving images creating a dialogue between the different visual techniques that Buckley experiments with that has it’s own visual narrative.

Alexander Gutke’s, 1-2-3-4 , is video work that plays with the notion of sculpture and performance. The lone snare drum and the cacophony of falling drumsticks focuses on illusionism, the cinematic and performance. Gutke’s work is investigative in that he is interested in the mechanics of the camera, film and slide projectors, he often uses these as tools to create a poetic and minimalist deconstruction of the apparatuses while in this film he engages in visual and aural trickery not to deconstruct the mechanics but to create an almost mystical performance without human intervention.

What connects these artists is the sense of illusion that pervades the works, they play with the viewer’s perception through both visual and sounds while also taking everyday objects appropriating them and reanimating them in an alternative context that is both poetic and romantic.

Projects

Eileen Gray: Architect Designer Painter

October 19, 2013 admin

Irish Museum of Modern Art

12 October, 2013 – 19 January, 2014

IMMA is delighted to present this major retrospective of the work of Eileen Gray, one of the most celebrated and influential designers and architects of the 20th-century. Designed and produced by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with IMMA, this exhibition is a tribute to Gray’s career as a leading member of the modern design movement. The exhibition at IMMA celebrates Gray’s Irish roots and presents a number of previously unseen works that offer new insights into Gray’s extraordinary career.

Gray’s work has often been split into two parts by critics, with decorative arts on the one hand and architectural modernism on the other. This exhibition approaches Gray’s work as a whole, engaging, as she did, in drawing, painting, lacquering, interior decorating, architecture and photography. Renowned in France during the early decades of the 20th-century as a designer in lacquer furniture and interiors, Gray began to experiment with architecture in the late 1920s. The exhibition includes lacquer work, several of her carpet designs, samples from her Paris shop Jean Désert and key items of furniture from her work on the apartment of Madame Mathieu Levy and Gray’s own home, Tempe à Pailla.

Significant focus is given to her landmark piece of modernist architecture the French villa E-1027, built in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in 1926-1929, in close collaboration with Romanian architect Jean Badovici. The exhibition includes examples of furniture for E-1027, including the tubular steel designs with which Gray’s name has become synonymous.

Eileen Gray (1878-1976) was born near Enniscorthy, Co Wexford and spent most of her childhood between Ireland and London. In 1902 Gray moved to Paris. She died in France at the age of 98. This extensive exhibition presents a unique opportunity for Irish audiences to experience a large group of work by one of Ireland’s most important cultural figures.

The exhibition has been designed and produced by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with IMMA. The exhibition is curated by Cloé Pitiot, Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Projects

Richard Mosse, The Enclave

June 19, 2013 admin

La Biennale di Venezia

The Pavilion of Ireland

June 1, 2013 – November 24, 2013

Kilkenny, Ireland, 1 March 2013 – Richard Mosse will represent Ireland with The Enclave, a major new multi-media installation at the 55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The Commissioner and Curator is Anna O’Sullivan, Director of the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland. Ireland at Venice is an initiative of Culture Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Throughout 2012, Richard Mosse and his collaborators Trevor Tweeten and Ben Frost travelled to Eastern Congo and inserted themselves as journalists within armed rebel groups in a war zone plagued by frequent ambushes, massacres and systematic sexual violence. The resulting installation, The Enclave, is the culmination of Mosse’sproject, Infra, which employs a discontinued military reconnaissance film that registers infrared light – an invisible spectrum – and was originally designed for camouflage detection. Mosse uses this film to reveal a cancerous yet unseen humanitarian tragedy with a disturbing psychedelic palette, posing aesthetic questions in a situation of profound human suffering.

The resulting imagery, shot on 16mm colour infrared film by Trevor Tweeten, renders the Sub-Saharan jungle war zone in sickly hues of crimson, purple, teal blue and hot pink. Ben Frost’s ambient audio composition, comprised entirely of organic Congolese sound recordings, hovers bleakly over the unfolding tragedy. At the work’s heart is a series of first hand women’s witness testimonies, calmly recounting horrific massacres. These tragic soliloquies are laid over imagery of posturing rebels.

“I am beginning to perceive this vicious loop,” Mosse writes from Goma, “of subject and object. The camera provokes an involuntary unraveling, a mutual hijack of authorship and autonomy.” Neither scripted nor directed, Congolese rebels return the camera’s gaze in a distinctly confrontational and accusatory manner. The lens seems to mesmerise and provoke everyone it encounters in The Enclave, including rebels ﬁghting under the command of those sought for trial by the international criminal court. This precarious face-off reveals inherent ambiguities of masculinity,defiance,vulnerability, and indictment. These narratives defy human comprehension, and push past the boundaries of adequate representation. The Enclave is an attempt to recoup ethical agency for aesthetics. Disregarding the rules and protocol of journalism, and working independently of humanitarian and UN infrastructures, Mosse, Tweeten and Frost have created a discomfiting and sinister world to penetrate sensibilities and make this ineffable nightmare visible.