Category Archives: 2016

2016, Curating

Barbara Knezevic Exquisite Tempo Sector

March 20, 2017 admin

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

November 17, 2016 – January, 27, 2017

Installation Temple Bar Gallery + Studio, courtesy of the artist + Louis Haugh

acrylic Perspex, air, ash, auto-poles, bark, beech, blue alabaster, bottled water, cedarwood oil, clamps, cotton candle wick, cypress oil, digital images, earthenware clay, electric light, electrical cords, elm, Fuji crystal archive photographic paper, glaze, heat lamps, Ilford resin-coated photographic paper, Irish sea water, LED television, ‘live surface’ patinated bronze, Monstera deliciosa, polyurethane foam, rapeseed oil, rock salt, sandalwood oil, soil, soya wax, spikenard oil, terracotta clay, tripods, vetiver oil.

This is a list of the materials present in Exquisite tempo sector. The exhibition is an omnivorous selection of things acting together to call to mind a film set, a photographic shoot, retail and museum displays and other stagings of stuff in the world. These items are arranged with attention to, though not always respecting museological conventions that make visible the hierarchies of value in material culture.

The force of time is central to this exhibition; the influence of human, material, geological and ecological duration is present throughout. Candle sculptures flicker and ooze and seawater and other liquids evaporate silently. The stems of Monstera deliciosa, the quintessential house-plant, gradually unfurl to reveal tender, pale green leaves that gradually become darker and tougher. These plants count out their own metronomic beat, an inbuilt and primordial rhythm dictated by the influence of light, heat and moisture. Some materials are known only by their absence, present as chemical apparitions in a photogram, characterized as versions of themselves in photographic C-type prints or digitally on an LED screen.

At times, this display invites a relaxation into the seduction of viewing, an immersion in affect. It is felt in the warm glow of candlelight, in the scent of woody, earthy essential oils, the quasi-healing power of salt lamps and the rustic, matte surfaces of hand-built ceramics. A refusal to this way of being with artworks is provided by the reflective surfaces of clear acrylic plinths and offered by the slick surfaces of high-gloss photographs. The presence of tripods and other ancillary photographic apparatus in the display insist on an awareness of the act of viewing and being with things, and the durational nature of an artistic exhibition.

This exhibition is about the exposure of artworks and matter; to light, viewing, time, human activity and to each other. It is a reflection on the life span of things, and what remains when they seem to be gone.

2016, Curating

Orla Barry Breaking Rainbows

March 20, 2017 admin

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

October 7 – November 5 2016

04-breaking-rainbows-exhibition-web

Exploring the boundaries of art and life, Breaking Rainbows uses the relationship between wo/man and animal, and the cannibalistic, symbiotic tension between [Orla Barry] the artist and [Orla Barry] the shepherd to reflect on the primal, poetic and unpredictable bond we have with the natural world. Presented as a live performance and video installation, Barry’s new work is a fascinating journey into the land of shepherding through the lens of ‘doing’ rather than ‘observing’ the job at hand. The tour will begin in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, running from September 29th to November 5th 2016.

06-breaking-rainbows-exhibition-web

Endearing, humorous and challenging, Breaking Rainbows reflects on both our interdependence and disconnection from the natural environment. Made up of a series of vignettes, Barry’s new work brings us into a journey through time, conceptualisations and effects: from the realms of sheep farming traditions, ancient Greek shepherd’s singing competitions, contemporary consumerism and gender roles, to the intimate relationship of caring for a sheep about to give birth.

11-breaking-rainbows-exhibition-web

Interweaving live performance, video, a 300 kg pile of wool produced on Barry’s farm in 2015, and an aural landscape which touches many different forms of speech, Breaking Rainbows is congruous with Orla Barry’s multidisciplinary aesthetic. However, as in her most recent work, Mountain, it also marks a new step in her trajectory by introducing chance procedures and a collaborative approach to the development of the texts. This results in the stories being reinvented and reshaped, defying notions of ownership, authorship and authenticity, and thus also reflecting on the nature of oral storytelling as transferred throughout generations. This is played out in an unpredictable dramaturgy in which no performance or experience of the installation is the same.

Orla Barry is both visual artist and shepherd. She lived in Brussels for sixteen years and now runs a flock of pedigree Lleyn sheep in rural Wexford. A leitmotif running through her recent work is the human disconnection from the natural environment. Barry writes, and makes performances, video and sound installations. She has shown work at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, SMAK and Tate Modern, amongst others, as well as taking part in Manifesta 2.

This is work is a work of fiction. An exaggerated story. A cacophony of voices and words. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are the products of Orla Barry’s imagination and are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

40-breaking-rainbows-exhibition-web

Commissioned and produced by Wexford Arts Centre, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios | co-production Kaaitheater, ARGOS centre for art and media, Crawford Art Gallery| funded by Arts Council of Ireland | support Dublin Theatre Festival, Midsummer Festival Cork, Opera Festival Wexford, IMMA’s Residency Program

071-breaking-rainbows-web

2016

Duality of Form

February 17, 2016 admin

Solstice Arts Centre

January 20th – March 11th

Eleanor Duffin/Caoimhe Kilfeather/ Barbara Knezevic

Duality of form is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of objects and how their meaning comes into being. The world of objects and artifacts are a trove of hidden meanings that evolve and change over time. As artworks, objects demonstrate their capacity to elude definition. In contemporary society we are defined by what we consume and collect, within these parameters we tend to define our environment. The invited artists explore and elucidate the idea of an object’s plurivocality through sculpture, photography, drawing and text.

In his book Illuminations, Walter Benjamin wrote that every object was invested with a double valence: negative and positive, like an object and its shadow. In the lifecycle of an object when it is created he viewed it as vested in its utopian dimension, its cynical dimension was as a commodity and only in its obsolescence could it regain its freedom. He remarked: “only in extinction is the (true) collector comprehended”[1]. Both Caoimhe Kilfeather and Barbara Knezevic play with this notion of the artist as a collector, as someone who ‘liberates things from the bondage of utility.’ What is decisive for Benjamin is that the “object be dissociated from all its original function in order to enter into the closest possible relationships with its equivalent. This is the diametric opposite of use, and stands under the curious category of completeness”[2].

Caoimhe Kilfeather’s photographic series titled Skep, looks at the properties of a defunct object that reflects outmoded practices as well as form and aperture. A Skep was used for collecting bees and has now become an ornament. Kilfeather’s oval line of bronze shown in conjunction with the photographs delineates the base of the skep as it rotates and outlines a boundary that alludes to drawing and perhaps a space that objects are contained. Her second photographic series in the exhibition of facades relate directly to the hanging ceramic tile works. They point to real world environments and reflect on the subjective nature of memory when recalling details of places. Memories tend to be a construct of objects, which retain significance only when recalled.

Through her sculptural pieces Barbara Knezevic traces possible meanings that are trapped in material objects that conspire to evade us through their presence and absence. Pine broomhandles are scorched and burnt in coded patterns, a floor piece of a knotted rope the center of which burnt is out, a clear cast glass object is placed in the center. The interconnectivity between the pieces allows us to decode possible interpretations of the works. Fire is a signifier of civilization, it destroys, illuminates, purifies. Knezevic edits and rearranges objects into unstable and often temporary arrangements creating new relationships between objects. The materials are conduits of meaning

The artist Marcel Broodthaer’s when talking about his work stated; ‘that fiction allows us to grasp reality and at the same time what it hides’.[3] Similarly, Eleanor Duffin creates a fictive space through her publication Phantom of Form; using text and graphics she creates a narrative around a fictional ‘other’ woman whose primary focus is materiality in relation to objects and their functional presence. The female protagonist is a device to create distance between the artist and her work. This resonates with Benjamin’s idea of the ‘double valence’ – in this case the artist and her shadow. Duffin through this work explores how language can inform sculpture and how material/immaterial language can be manifested in text and in visual formulation.

We have now entered speculative realism – ‘a world where the object, whether thing, tool commodity, thought, phenomenon or living creature has regained its rights, freed from the subject of mind, body and gaze’[4]. The artists demonstrate this liberation through artworks that obstruct, disrupt and interfere with social-norms. In a time when objects tend to define us through our reliance on them for validation, to communicate, socialise, we perhaps need to re-assess our relationship to the object and turn our gaze.

[1] Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, Fontana Press, UK, 1973, 41.

[2] Ibid., 38.

[3] Krauss, Rosalind, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the age of the Post-Medium condition’, Thames & Hudson, UK, 1999, 41.

[4] Hudek, Anthony, The object: Documents of contemporary art, Whitechapel Gallery & MIT Press, UK, 2014, 16.