Ella de Burca and Ciara McMahon
Opening: 1st December 2011. 7pm – late
(This is a BYOB event with live music by Liselle McMahon,)
Show continues daily: 2nd – 6th December 2011, 12am – 9pm.
Former NCAD MA students, Ella de Burca and Ciara McMahon present The XXX (a holiday in a domestic space) for the first week of December 2011. Viewers are invited to join the artists in a series of events over the course of a six day possession/installation of a holiday apartment. All participants are asked to RSVP to xxxholidayapartment@gmail.com for information about exact location, and details regarding the seminars.
The XXX (a holiday in a domestic space) is accompanied by commissioned essays by Kathy Tynan and Frank Wasser, in addition to texts by both artists, which are available in both pdf (when you email the afore-mentioned address), and hard-copy (in the holiday apartment).
The XXX presents new work by Ella de Burca and Ciara McMahon installed in a Dublin city-center holiday apartment. The work resulted from the artist’s participation in a thematic residency at The Banff Center, Canada. Both artists have individually engaged with questions of time, memory and the incoherent, potential futile attempts to understand the incomprehensible.
Ella de Burca used her time in Banff as an ontological study in trust, and time. Playing with iconography and the photograph as [object vs jpeg] she exposed images on her Ipod to light sensitive paper, creating mirror/negative prints of the information on the screen. By removing the role of the [negative/camera], and allowing the ipod to ‘perform’ she captured the gesture of [Internet surfing] onto chemically treated paper, creating a more permanent memento to an otherwise transitory and amorphous action. During the XXX vocation/vacation, de Burca will be available everyday on skype, to perform a reading of Bataille’s ‘The Labyrinth’ to whoever calls. A text that unravels the spatial qualities of being, insufficiency and linguistics, the performance will question notions of presence as the spectator witnesses a ‘live’ reading over the Internet, situated in the temporary space of a holiday apartment, but also temporarily situated in an uncontrollable and unknown space, based entirely on the location of the viewers computer.
Ciara McMahon’s work, Temporal Sequencing (Present Perfect Continuous) 2011, is a meditation on site, memory and the neuropsychology of time. Created while in Banff, the artist developed the work while practicing a variation of a Taoist walking meditation. McMahon climbed Sleeping Buffalo mountain repetitively documenting the process with video, audio and in-congruently a series of Van Dyke prints. Temporal Sequencing (Present Perfect Continuous) 2011 is the resulting work. During XXX’s week long occupation of the site, McMahon will again perform a walking meditation, moving the work from the privacy of her studio to a pseudo-privacy of a holiday domestic space. Viewers are invited to join her either in the meditative action or by using a meditation machine during XXX (a holiday in a domestic space) retention.