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