Tue 12th March – Saturday 15th June (inclusive)
Launch date 14th March 2013, 6pm
The LAB, Dublin is pleased to invite you to Public Gesture, an exhibition of projects by students of the MA in Visual Arts Practices (MAVIS) at IADT. Public Gesture opens from 10:00am to 8:00pm on Tuesday 12th March 2013, and continues until Saturday 15th June 2013. Gallery opening hours are from 10am to 8pm weekdays and until 5:00pm Saturdays, (closed on Sunday).
The exhibition includes new work by Ewelina Bubanja, Alan-James Burns, Darren Caffrey, Caroline Doolin, Debbie Guinnane, Etaoin Holahan, Michael Holly, Donna Kiernan, Emer Lynch, Fiona Marron, Sorka Rae-Healy, Martina O’Brien, Sue Rainsford, Edel Robinson and Helena Tobin.
The 2013 iteration of Public Gesture has been conceived in the spirit of limitation and collaboration. Working within a condensed timeframe, and with limited resources, the artists, curators and critics have composed an experimental exhibition that seeks to highlight methods for interdisciplinary cooperation. With divergent responses, including video, installation, photography, performance and sound works, the exhibition provides a platform for new works to be tested in the public arena.
Emer Lynch, Fiona Marron, Caroline Doolin, Alan-James Burns.
Open on Tuesday 12th March until Saturday 30th March.
This exhibition is accompanied by a commissioned text by critic Sean O’Sullivan.
Alan-James Burns (art-making pathway)
Burns’ practice examines the individuality and autonomy of a person’s cognitive process by conducting experiments and observations on multiple human subjects. In questioning the ability to act, think and feel autonomously, Burns creates multichannel video work and performance that investigates and reflects upon the dense history, processes and understandings of the human sciences.
Caroline Doolin (art-making pathway)
Caroline Doolin’s practice pursues the transformation of objects, images and information via in-depth research of selected sites and narratives. Recent sources of inquiry include the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland and the area known as Doggerland. With particular interest in the natural sciences, her work weaves with equal preference across sculpture, drawing, video and text. Through these processes she reconfigures both outmoded and contemporary materials of the scientist/ explorer. Naturalist illustration, field research, documentary footage, and pseudo-scientific devices are manipulated beyond their typical function thus generating their own classifications and logics. Observing both consistent and conflicting research, opinions, sightings and documentation, Doolin embraces these discrepancies to raise doubt as to the veracity of the objects, images, information and experiences she relays. A sculptural assemblage of found and adapted materials furnishes the tools necessary for an invocation of the Brocken Spectre.
Emer Lynch (curation pathway)
Reconsidering and repositioning specific materials underpins Lynch’s curatorial practice. Recently conducted European based projects have been influential in contextualising her research in Ireland (in particular Estonia, with whom Ireland shares several historical and cultural similarities).
Her interest in determining the potential of selected matter to invoke an atmosphere has shaped her curatorial approach. This is achieved largely through enquiry into the properties, production process and context of individual substances. Against a backdrop of spatial and temporal concerns, multi-sensory approaches to art-making are induced and a process-led method to exhibition production is adopted.
Fiona Marron (art-making pathway)
Fiona Marron’s practice relates to several interconnected social systems. Her process entails an engagement with curiosities of both pre-existing and constructed situations within contexts of labour and trade, the results of which are manifested predominantly as video installations.
In an installation incorporating industrial fibre-optic cable, she examines the specific ways in which materiality is entangled within advancements towards automation in technology, with consideration paid to the geographical and temporal concerns bound in these developments.
Etaoin Holahan, Helena Tobin
Open on Tuesday 2nd April until Saturday 13th April.
As part of this exhibition a public panel discussion is scheduled for Wednesday 10th April 2013 at 7pm. The event will be held in the conference room, 4th floor, The LAB, Foley Street, Dublin 1. Please RSVP to etaoinholahan@gmail.com.
Etaoin Holahan (curation pathway)
Etaoin’s curatorial practice is focused on events presented in an out-of-use pub, Fennelly’s in Callan, Kilkenny, a multi disciplinary hub that compliments the other exciting projects underway in Callan and Ireland. A recent project challenged dinner guests to participate in a social process of constructing meaning around Winnicott’s psychoanalytical term’s the “transitional object”. Nuno Sacramento’s essay on Praktika Residential Workshop and Clare Bishop’s Artificial Hells are key references as are Marta Minujin’s New York Cocktail parties. Etaoin studied architecture in Bolton Street for 3 years before studying Fine Art in Kilkenny and then Wales. She is the Chairperson of Endangered studios and one of the three co-founders of The Workhouse Test and a member of The Board of Guardians.
Helena Tobin (art-making pathway)
For Public Gesture, working with curator Etaoin Holahan, I will present a mixed media installation of my work referencing the burning of Bridget Cleary, which is the focus of my current research. We will concentrate on a particular period of time (three days) when Michael Cleary (her husband) having killed her, awaited her return at a nearby hill convinced he had killed a changeling.
Through this installation we will explore the overlap of belief and action through a study of a time where judgment is suspended, where there is uncertainty as to whether the outcome will fall on the side of good or bad, whether the protagonist will be defined as hero or villain.
Darren Caffrey, Sue Rainsford
Open on Tuesday 16th April until Saturday 27th April
As part of this exhibition three events are scheduled:
A public lecture “Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory within Contemporary Art Practice to contextualise work currently presented in The Cube Gallery” is scheduled for 6pm Wednesday 24th April 2013, and at 7pm on the same evening “an inspired talk by Darren Caffrey. Both events will be held in the conference room, 4th floor, The LAB, Foley Street, Dublin 1. Please RSVP to rainsfos@tcd.ie with Lecture in subject heading. At 5pm on Friday 26th April an Evening Performance will be held at The Cube Gallery. Please RSVP to rainsfos@tcd.ie with Evening Performance in the subject heading.
Darren Caffrey (art-making pathway)
Exploring the current between objects and ideas, for two weeks lasers and jam will make of the floor a game. On the Friday evening before this show closes, play will be enacted as a live event. If you attend this presentation, an Irish girl will feed you jam from a tiny spoon. An Irish boy will dance. A variously inspired talk which will take place @ 7 on the Wednesday before this performance presentation.
Reading ideas:
- http://www.communistpartyofireland.ie/sv2008-03/02iwd1.html
- http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite4_1_15/06/2011_394823
- http://physics.about.com/od/physicsitol/g/laser.htm
Sue Rainsford (criticism pathway)
‘Can there be a women’s art that exists in its own ‘female’ space, away from patriarchy and masculinist ideas and experiences?’ – Julia Kristeva
It is not only ‘women’s art’ that can be questioned within such a template, but the very possibility of women’s expression. My work for Public Gesture is not an attempt to achieve an absolute feminine voice, but to examine the experienced ramifications of such seemingly sterile psychoanalytic theory, and question its contemporary validity or relevance: is it possible that women live out a reality thus prescribed? To what extent do such latent structures impinge on self-perception?
Sorka Rae-Healy, Martina O’Brien
Open on Tuesday 30th April until Saturday 11th May
As part of this exhibition two events are scheduled:
At 1pm on Friday 10th May members of ‘Spectacle of Defiance and Hope’ will perform inside the Cube Gallery and a group of singers from ‘Songs of Grievance’, a musical project by Sean Millar with members of ‘Spectacle of Defiance & Hope’ will perform outside the gallery. Please RSVP to sorka.healy@gmail.com with Performance in the subject heading. A roundtable discussion on Art and Activisim with invited speakers is scheduled for Wednesday 8th May at 7pm. The event will be held in the conference room, 4th floor, The LAB, Foley Street, Dublin 1. Please RSVP to sorka.healy@gmail.com with Art and Activism in the subject heading.
Martina O’Brien (art-making pathway)
‘Calculation,imagination and performance enables specific futures to be made present while remaining absent, whether through a graph of future losses, a story of a journey or a feeling of shock’ Ben Anderson, Durham University, UK.
In my current practice I draw upon aspects of calculation/risk assessment mapping and both imagination and performance to investigate ways to bring about social empowerment. I am interested in how art within the public realm can give a society a voice, how it can be utilized as an accessible language in which to mediate awareness of an issue, how it can act to gain political engagement and how it can create disaster risk reduction by preemption and anticipatory action.
Sorka Rae-Healy (curation pathway)
Sorcha is an emerging independent curator whose work is focused on the creation and curation of situation-led ‘sites of resistance’ specifically for non-art audiences in ‘public’ spaces in Ireland in order to stimulate the production of shifts in perception by curating work which challenges limitations in irish civic imagination. Her current projects ‘Poster#Politik’ and ‘m_ART’ are informed by a wider interest in exploring the agency of art as a tool for responsible citizenship, for stimulating the imagining of new possibilities, new knowledge systems and re-positioning art’s agency beyond global market exchange value.
Deleuze maintains that even within the most dominating and closed system, there are gaps which resist totalization. These are the gaps, or points of rupture, that I am interested in exploring in my practice; creating & curating events as ‘social action’ in public places that transcend the quotidian, short-circuit the mundane and enable citizen co-collaboration in the production of radical rhizomatic systems of knowledge.
Ewelina Bubanja, Michael Holly
Open on Tuesday 14th May until Saturday 25th May.
As part of this exhibition, artist Michael Holly will give a talk on his artistic process on Wednesday 15th May 2013 at 6pm. The event will be held in the conference room, 4th floor, The LAB, Foley Street, Dublin 1. Please RSVP to bubanjae@tcd.ie
Ewelina Bubanja (curation pathway)
Ewelina Bubanja is a curator and writer based in Dublin. She holds a degree in Art History and Italian from Trinity College Dublin and is currently in the final year of Masters in Visual Art Practices at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire. Her interests are in the practices and power relations within modes of display and discourses on audience addressing of the shifts concerning production, distribution, and reception of exhibitions.
Michael Holly (art-making pathway)
Michael Holly is currently in the final year of a MA in Visual Arts Practice at IADT, Dún Laoghaire. His research and visual art practice is concerned with the development of myth by, and within public institutional models, and with the effect that this myth-making has on individual and national identities. Michael has been a practicing artist and commercial photographer for over 10 years, and has previously exhibited work in Dublin and Kilkenny, as well as in Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver in Canada.