The Exhibitionist | 9 | Dream Lover
News
This week I’m looking forward to the opening of Dream Lover at Eight Gallery, an exhibition by Sean Guinan, Ramon Kassam and Aidan O’Sullivan. All three are classmates and graduates of LSAD and each have kept up a strong painting practice. The show opens tomorrow night at 6pm. Here’s what the press release says about the work;
“The title Dream Lover refers to the popular rock n’ roll song written and recorded in 1959 by Bobby Darin. The title here is intended to imply a conception of desire that is centered in the ideal or the idealized object, state, space or figure, which embodies the values and traits of the subject/dreamer; a conceptual premise arising from this grouping of practices. Each practice is driven by a sense of desire and escapism, which is paradoxically contained within a set of strict parameters. It is amid the constraints of the physical and psychological spaces of the studio, canvas and tradition of painting, that each artist attempts to seek and play out these instinctive desires. Dream Lover as a cultural concept, arising in film, music, art, stories, etc, represents an ongoing impulse in society to grasp or understand things via expressive processes.”
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Round-up
Shows opening around the country this week:
Sarah Lundy at Custom House Studios
sign:symbol:sigil
22 January – 15 February | Opening: 22 January at 7.30pm
Custom House Studios, Westport Quay, Co. Mayo
Through the use of moving image, assemblage of quotidian objects and ephemeral performance materials, the works endeavour to negotiate provocative arrangement and question autonomy in the face of innate and applied homogenization.
Repetition features regularly in my practice, often manifesting itself in large-scale sculptural pieces that prompt dialogue on the systems that govern our existence. This meditation on systems is often juxtaposed starkly with single and singular items displaced and then displayed.
The aesthetic is post-minimalist with a focus on eloquent paradoxes of form and function, and their relationship to identity, with frequent reference to the feminine perspective.
Gavin Porter at Custom House Studios
22 January – 15 February | Opening: 22 January at 7.30pm
Custom House Studios, Westport Quay, Co. Mayo
Custom House Studios at Westport Quay are pleased to host an exhibition of new works by Gavin Porter opening on Thursday 22nd January 2015 at 7.30pm, and continuing every day until February 15th 2015. At Custom House Studios Gallery, The Quay, Westport. Co Mayo.
Gavin Porter is a Belfast born Artist living in County Roscommon. His artistic output consists of drawing, etching, sound installation and assemblage, with etching being his main medium of choice. In 2013 he was one of three emerging artists chosen for In Isolation, at Broadstone Studios, Dublin, In 2014, Gavin was selected for an inaugural residency at Harrington Studios, King House, Boyle, and later that year was awarded first prize at the North West Open exhibition in Leitrim Sculpture Centre.
PLASTIK Festival of Artists’ Moving Image – Galway, Cork, Dublin
PLASTIK, Ireland’s inaugural festival of artists’ moving image and experimental film has announced a special event to launch the festival programme in Galway, recently designated a UNESCO City of Film.
Over the course of 3 weekends throughout February; in venues in Galway, Cork and Dublin, PLASTIK offers a distinct programme that brings international and Irish work together with a focus on contemporary artists’ moving image not previously shown in Ireland. It will offer the opportunity to view a large number of films with post screening talks with curators/artists, a programme of discursive events and live performances.
Special guests include Brad Butler, Luis Recoder & Sandra Gibson, David Gatten with films from Turner Prize winer 2014 Irish artist Duncan Campbell, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and emerging Irish artists working in film.
Full programme information will be available from 16 January via plastikfestival.com with a launch event taking place in An Taibhdhearc Theatre, Middle Street, Galway at 6pm. Alongside this launch, a panel discussion co-ordinated by the PLASTIK Festival’s Galway curator Megs Morley will take place on production, distribution and exhibition of artist films and what the Unesco City of Film status could mean to artists working on film in Galway.
Chaired by Daniel Fitzpatrick, Curator PLASTIK Festival, panelists include: Tracy Geraghty (Picture Palas), Rod Stoneman (Huston School of Film & Digital Media), Declan Gibbons (Galway Film Centre), Maeve Mulrennan (Galway Arts Centre), Celine Curtin (GMIT Centre for Creative Arts) as well as artist Gareth Kennedy and Louise Manifold & Úna Quigley from Wild Screen.
The launch event will finish 7:30pm, followed by the opening of Gareth Kennedy’s Solo Exhibition in Galway Arts Centre At 8:00pm.
PLASTIK FESTIVAL DATES
GALWAY:
16 January 2015, 6:00-7:30pm, An Taibhdhearc Theatre, PLASTIK Festival Programme Launch and Panel Discussion
7 February 2015, An Taibhdhearc Theatre, PLASTIK Festival Programme curated by Megs Morley
CORK:
13, 14, 15 Fenruary 2015 Crawford Gallery, Triskel Arts Centre, The Guesthouse curated by Aoife Desmond
DUBLIN:
20, 21, 22 February 2015, IFI, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios curated by PLASTIK Festival – Sibyl Montague, Jenny Brady, Fifi Smith, Daniel Fitzpatrick with guest programmers Gerard Byrne, Sarah Pierce, Filipa Ramos, Peter Taylor, Guillaume Breton.
‘Cosmic Dust’ | Group Exhibition at VISUAL
Cosmic Dust
Saturday January 24 – Friday May 17, 2015
VISUAL, Old Dublin Road, Carlow.
Rudolf Steiner, Anita Groener, Martin Healey, Brian King, Chris Fite Wassilak, Ruth Lyons, Mark Cullen and Remco de Fouw. Featuring George Melies film Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)
Cosmic dust: tiny particles of solid material floating around in the space between the stars.This organic matter is the raw material from which planets like the earth are made from.
Gathering together the ideas of artists, scientists and philosophers, Cosmic Dust explores ways in which art, science and the spiritual can combine to offer a deeper understanding of existence.
From our connection to the natural world to our place in the stars, the exhibition delves into humanity’s poetic attempts to build systems of thought, meaning and belonging in the face of a vast and unknowable universe.
The exhibition includes some beautiful explorations of this idea by artists, including Martin Healy’s Aether, a film exploring the 1907 vision of utopian architectural visionary Paul Scheebart and his quest to build a perpetual motion machine that would offer the world access to free energy.
There’s also a selection of blackboard drawings by Rudolf Steiner, produced between 1919 and 1924 . Steiner gave over five thousand lectures on subjects as varied as spirituality, aesthetics, agriculture, and education. In 1919, his colleague began placing sheets of black paper over the blackboards used in his talks, and then dating and storing the resulting works on paper.
Johnny Savage at The Riverbank Arts Centre
Fallout
17 January – 21 March | Opening night: January 24th 18.30, being opened by Christine Redmond
The Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Co. Kildare
The Riverbank Arts Centre presents Fallout, a new exhibition of work by photographer Johnny Savage. Fallout is a series of surreal and eerie landscapes that take us on a journey through the nowhere spaces left behind by the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom in Ireland.
Empty apartment buildings, retail outlets and showrooms form the backdrop for this series of stark images. Places of unfulfilled dreams and investments, places we have almost forgotten about, but which continue to haunt us. These photographs could be from the edge of any Irish town or city, this place is universal, sharing the same non-descript architecture, the same emptiness and similarly disconnected from their surroundings.
Photographing in the twilight of dusk and dawn, Savage uses reflections to create complex and layered images. These photographs lay bare the façade of the boom and reveal the drastic ways in which we allowed it to change the places we live and how we live. In these images we see the illusion of wealth and certainty fade away revealing a new Irish landscape littered with ruins from times past.
www.riverbank.ie | www.johnnysavage.com
Janine Davidson at Black Church Cabinet
Captive Light
18 December – 31 January
Black Church Cabinet, 4 Temple Bar, Dublin 2
The Black Church Cabinet is an experimental exhibition space in the heart of Temple Bar.
Black Church Cabinet is a niche, vertical vitrine situated at street level. With a wide incidental audience, the space is highly visible, and offers a great opportunity for showcasing new talent in the centre of Dublin’s cultural quarter.
The current exhibition runs from December 18th 2014 – January 31st 2015. Artist and Black Church Studio Member, Janine Davidson has contributed a triptych of Giclee prints entitled, Captive Light.
www.print.ie | www.janinedavidson.com
Experimental Film Club | ‘The Starry Messenger’ at Irish Film Institute / Weds / 6.30pm /Jan 21st
January 21st at 6.30pm
Irish Film Institute, Temple Bar, 6 Eustace Street, Dublin
‘The Starry Messenger’ was initially an exhibition curated by Declan Sheehan for Derry’s Void Gallery in 2014, a project engaging with the materiality of film as a manifestly analogue physical and chemical process. Seven artist filmmakers engage with the materiality of the film medium through physical and digital manipulation of celluloid, the use of alternative processes, whilst also engaging with film as a trace of time, of site, and of memory.
www.experimentalfilmclub.blogspot.com
Pamela de Brí at National Photographic Archive
9 January – 24 May
National Photographic Archive, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin 2
Opening times: Mon – Sat 10 – 5; Sunday: 12 – 5
Midland – Lár Tíre: Cycling the MGWR from Past to Present is the third and most comprehensive in a series of exhibitions, which involved the artist Pamela de Brí cycling the entire route of the old railway network, the former Midland Great Western Railway (MGWR).
This bilingual multimedia installation consists of photographs, audio clips, maps, video, notebooks and sculptural work taken from The Midland Project.
https://sites.google.com/site/cucuart/home/midland-lar-tire | www.cucuart.com
Head of Wantastiquet Performance at Steambox Gallery
Saturday, 24 January at 8:30–11:30pm
Steambox Gallery, School Street, Dublin 8
Sonic arts performance of Head of Wantastiquet with Fuzzy Hell, Three Eyed Makara and GOD HATES DISCO.
What: Head of Wantastiquet (USA/DE) is Paul LaBrecque’s (Sunburned Hand of the Man, Astral Blessing) solo shaman body melt unit. The music is a thoroughly Modern/NOW take on the early minimalist experiments of John Cale’s Sun Blindness tapes, projected through a prism that refracts into hallucinatory images of Andrew Wyeth and Caspar Friedrich, the temporal finality of Altamont and Kenneth Anger, the bare feet grounded to the soil of Träd Gräs och Stenar, and the beautiful desolation of Doc Boggs’ early 20th century Appalachian hollers.
GOD HATES DISCO
Cut & paste electronics from Dublin’s most favored basement dweller: https://www.facebook.com/GODHATESDISCO
Three Eyed Makara
The sounds of sea creatures battling on the sea floor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryVZH-TlGJ0
Fuzzy Hell
J Mascis meets Prince on a lake in Athlone.
http://bandcamp.com/tag/fuzzy-hell
‘Dream Lover’ | Group Exhibition at Eight Gallery
Dream Lover
23rd January – 6 February | Preview: 22 January at 6pm
Eight Gallery, 1st Floor, No. 8, Dawson Street, Dublin 2
SEÁN GUINAN | RAMON KASSAM | AIDAN O’SULLIVAN
Dream Lover is a three-person project at Eight, Dublin, by Irish artists Seán Guinan, Ramon Kassam and Aidan O’Sullivan. It intends to open out to the viewer three distinct yet connected painting practices.
The title Dream Lover refers to the popular rock n’ roll song written and recorded in 1959 by Bobby Darin. The title here is intended to imply a conception of desire that is centered in the ideal or the idealized object, state, space or figure, which embodies the values and traits of the subject/dreamer; a conceptual premise arising from this grouping of practices. Each practice is driven by a sense of desire and escapism, which is paradoxically contained within a set of strict parameters. It is amid the constraints of the physical and psychological spaces of the studio, canvas and tradition of painting, that each artist attempts to seek and play out these instinctive desires. Dream Lover as a cultural concept, arising in film, music, art, stories, etc, represents an ongoing impulse in society to grasp or understand things via expressive processes.
Brian Duggan at Crawford Art Gallery
The Last Day Diary
23 January – 30 March
Crawford Art Gallery, Emmett Pl, Cork
Crawford Art Gallery is delighted to present the premier screening of The Last Day Diary (2015) by Brian Duggan, as part of the gallery’s continued screening programme of Irish and International artists.
The Last Day Diary is a new short HD film inspired from a specific historical relic from the Johnson County War in 1882 Wyoming. The film’s initial location of privilage and safety in the grand eighteenth century entrance hall of Charlemont House, is in stark contrast to the narration’s guiding text from a hand written letter found on the body of Nathan D. Champion. Falsely accused by a wealthy Wyoming cattleman’s association, Champion was the first person murdered by a band of hit men hired by the cattlemen. The letter he had written during the day of the seige in his cabin is a poignant testament of a person in crisis and the last hours he spent surrounded. The film concludes in Kaycee, Wyoming, where the original ambush took place one hundred and thirty three years ago.
The film is a powerful but comtemplative film which draws parallels to contemporary isssues of immigration and power, and the situations and pressures between those with land and those without. The Last Day Diary expands on Duggan’s larger body of work regarding citizenship, community and resistance which is influenced by themes in the film Heaven’s Gate (1980) a film based on A.S. Mercer’s 1894 book Banditti of the Plains. The book, which was banned in Wyoming due to political embarassment, is an eye-witness account of local small homesteader immigrant groups, mostly from eastern Europe, who are harrassed into abandoning their plots of land to earlier, polictically connected settlers having manipulated cattle grazing rights. The final text is a chilling and unnerving voice simply describing the very real and present danger the individual was experiencing. The film is pertininent contemporary concerns and insecurites of economic migration and social assimilation.
Brian Duggan’s invitation to actor John Hurt and actor and composer David Mansfield to contribute to the production of The Last Day Diary, echoes their significant roles in director’s Michael Cimino’s original 1980 epic western film (which infamously bankrupted United Artists Film Studio due to spiralling production costs). The strategic inclusion of these two proganists – the original score of Heaven’s Gate was composed by David Mansfield – set against the current wider societal backdrop of remembrance and commemoration questions how the written word and historical events are interpreted today with emphasis on ‘experience’ within historical interpretation.
The Last Day Diary was part funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and Fundit patrons.
