Green On Red Gallery 

July 8 – August 15,2009

Dawning of an aspect

Niall De Buitléar, Damien Flood, Laura Lancaster, Sonia Shiel

Dawning of An Aspect, an exhibition of four artists whose work offers an exploration of our capacity for perception through painting and sculpture. ‘Dawning of an aspect’ is taken from both Wittgenstein’s and Wollheim’s philosophical writings on the fundamental distinction between our perception and plain seeing. While the writings on this subject are based on painting, in this exhibition it is also applied to sculptural objects that reveal themselves through the act of looking. This twofold nature of our perception involves both the surface and subject simultaneously.

Wittgenstein’s aim was to dissolve the paradoxical appearance of aspect-dawning: when looking at a picture-object we can come to see it differently, although we also see that the picture-object itself remains unchanged. Wollheim’s writings view the expressiveness of depiction through psychoanalytic concept of projection in which we come to see a piece of the external world as corresponding to an inward state of mind which he referred to as the internal spectator.

The experience of seeing resemblances within the pictorial representation is an essential aspect of this idea. 
 
Niall De Buitléar’s use of found objects and re-presenting them as sculptural forms, play with both the history of the found objects and the potentiality to mutate into abstract sculptural forms. It is the recognizable element in the works that reveals the transformation from the everyday to sculptural object. 

Damien Flood’s paintings occupy a space between fact and fiction. His work, while primarily landscape in line with the traditional notion of painting reveals a world of discovery and illusion. 

Laura Lancaster’s paintings reveal an element of nostalgia; the figures emerge from the blurred landscape, depicting a moment within a narrative structure that is part of a larger schema. 

Sonia Shiel’s work commandeers miscellaneous everyday materials to build literal fabrications of ‘lofty’ notions. Her shambolic constructions simultaneously rouse and abandon ceremony, pomp and ego. They merge video, sculpture and paintings to expose subjects associated with the world’s make –up and by revealing their own, assume the subject of creativity itself.