ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Doubt and Visual Representation Symposium

University College Cork
10th-11th May 2013
http://ucc-art-symposium.com/about/

Next weekend UCC are hosting an art symposium on the topic of Doubt and Visual Representation. Both current MA ACW student Susan Connolly and MA ACW graduate Rebecca O’Dwyer will be delivering papers at the event, along with many other speakers. The symposium is organised by postgraduate students from the MA in Modern and Contemporary, Art History, Theory and Criticism. Full schedule of talks is here. Following information is from the symposium website:

We encounter doubt every day. From the inane to the important, doubt infiltrates almost every thought, feeling and circumstance. Yet, what is doubt? Can doubt be defined? What does doubt involve?

Thinking about artistic production and visual representation, in what ways can doubt be a catalyst for change? How might doubt alter our perception? Is doubt problematic or productive? Is doubt historically specific or contingent?

By means of an interdisciplinary approach, this conference aims to explore the issue of doubt in modern and contemporary art and visual culture. The theme of doubt and visual representation will be analysed through a variety of topics from multiple and dynamic perspectives, looking at doubt in painting, drawing, photography, architecture, philosophy and from practitioners’ perspectives also.

‘Stranger Stranger’

The COMPLEX, Smithfield
Between Smithfield and Museum Luas stops
Opening Thursday May 2nd at 6pm
May 2nd-9th
Open daily 12-6, Sat 2-6
Closed Sunday and Bank Holiday

Stranger Stranger is a group exhibition of work by students currently studying on Masters degrees at NCAD. The idea of stranger implies the context of a relationship ; in order for there to be a stranger a community must exist for it to be apart from. The community of Stranger Stranger is formed by the peer support of the exhibiting artists whose practices are concerned with communications beyond the habitual, the activation of public encounters and inviting viewers to ask questions.

‘POSTER#POLITIK’

POSTER#POLITIK

An exhibition by Martina O’ Brien | Mick O’ Kelly
Curated by Sorka Rae Healy
April 29th – May 10th
The LAB, Foley St., Dublin

Roundtable Discussion on Art & Activism : Dialogical Art Practice as a form of Activism
Speakers: Anthony Haughey, Jesse Jones, Mick Kelly and Fiona Whelan.
Thursday May 9th at 7pm

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“Art will never get out of its own ghetto until someone comes to need it. Among those who need it might be social movements that work toward solving the economic and political needs of societies all over the world. Unfortunately, these movements seem not to need artists to achieve their goals. Art needs to be reinvented…” Artur Zmijewski.

The poster as political trope occupies a unique place in the history of art and activism, from Rodchenko to Martha Rosler, from John Heartfield to Shepard Fairy, it is a recurring motif and a symbol of solidarity in the collective memory of political & social activists. Having been historically used by artists to elucidate socio-political concerns often depicting idealised progressive models of living (utopias) and collectivist ideals, the poster is a familiar tool in the activists tool box. Martina O’ Brien has produced a set of six posters as a response to her engagement with ‘Books of Grievance’, a set of twenty books depicting the hopes and grievances of the members of various Dublin-based Youth Groups, a project conceived and produced by ‘Spectacle of Defiance and Hope’. Resisting the institutionalisation or fetishisization of propaganda, and avoiding engagement with any specific political polemic, this work is conceived to explore the agency and use-value of aesthetic engagement in the context of street protest. Mick O’ Kelly‘s textual work explores the terms of engagement for the artist within existing societal order. Maintaining that the space of art and the political is a place of contingency marked by contradictions and conflict, he questions whether the gallery can be a space of critical engagement in challenging failed political systems in late capitalist society.
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As part of this exhibition a roundtable discussion on ‘Art & Activism : Dialogical Art Practice as a form of Activism‘, is scheduled for Thursday May 9th,. 7pm at The LAB, Foley Street. Dublin 1. Speakers: Anthony Haughey, Mick O’ Kelly, Fiona Whelan, Jesse Jones.
RSVP: sorka.healy@gmail.com

Anthony Haughey is an artist and lecturer/researcher in the School of Media at the Dublin Institute of Technology where he is also a PhD supervisor at the Centre for Research in Transcultural Media Practice.
He recently completed a three-year research fellowship at the Interface Centre for Research in Art, Technologies and Design at University of Ulster where he completed a PhD. During his research fellowship in Belfast he organised public discussion forums around Art and Contested Spaces, and curated public art projects including, Art, Media and Contested Space, an international public art event, which included artists, Alfredo Jaar, Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps and Wendy Ewald and Faisal Abdu’ Allah.
His recent work employs relational/dialogical aesthetics to explore notions of citizenship, migration and contested spaces. How to be a Model Citizen, (December 2008) was a participatory performance work with the Global Migration Research Network – a diverse group of asylum seekers and refugees who have worked with the artist for more than four years.

Jesse Jones creates works that primarily takes the form of film and video. She explores historical instances of communal culture and resistance that resonate with contemporary society and politics. Her practice uses devices such as drive-in cinemas, film, music and performance in order to explore popular culture as a site of shared collective social consciousness.

Jones has recently had solo-exhibitions at CCA Derry, Artsonje Seoul, Spike Island, Bristol, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, and REDCAT, Los Angeles, as well as projects at The New Museum, New York, and Serpentine Cinema, London. She is currently in the production phase of The Prosperity Project, a multi-disciplinary collaborative public art commission in Dublin which aims to deconstruct the idea of prosperity in Ireland’s post boom economy.

Mick O’Kelly is a Dublin-based visual artist. He completed a PhD with Interface at the University of Ulster Northern Ireland and an MFA with California Institute of the Arts. O’ Kelly’s research is informed by ongoing concerns with the changing nature of contemporary art, and issues of situated practice, location and context. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and engages in contextual art initiatives beyond the gallery and museum structure.

Work includes, ‘Nomadic Kitchen’; an interstitial art initiative that engages in the process of regeneration with the residents of Vila Nova, Sao Miguel Brazil and ‘Artwork in an Imperfect World’, a Dublin-based project which questioned the nature and potential of an artwork.

Fiona Whelan is an artist concerned with issues of inequality and social justice. Her practice is collaborative working across sector with one youth organization for over nine years steering a longitudinal site specific enquiry that facilitates interdisciplinary learning. Her practice attends to both macro and micro environments- the local and situational as well as the political and social, developing work that is multifaceted and multi vocal including reading events, film, dialogues, exhibitions and workshops. This has included the formation of the What’s the Story? Collective who lead a four year project exploring power relations with multiple manifestations including Policing Dialogues at The LAB in 2010. See www.section8.ie

Fiona is the Course Coordinator of the Graduate Diploma in Community/ Arts/ Education at NCAD which is currently being developed into a 2 year MA in Socially Engaged Art.

Artist Martina O’ Brien and curator Sorka Rae Healy are students on the MA in Visual Arts Practices (MAVIS) course at IADT.

This event is scheduled as part of POSTER#POLITIK, an exhibition conceived for Public Gesture 2013. Public Gesture is an annual experimental exhibition of projects by students of the MA in Visual Arts Practices (MAVIS) at IADT.

POSTER#POLITIK opens in The LAB’s CUBE Gallery on Tuesday April 30th and continues to Saturday May 11th.

PVA Cork Edition Launch at the NSF

Paper Visual Art Journal – Cork Edition
The National Sculpture Factory
Cork City
Thursday 2 May, 2013
6-8pm

Paper Visual Art will be launching a Cork-based, hard copy edition at the National Sculpture Factory on Thursday 2 May, 2013 from 6-8pm. This is the second of a three-part, city-specific project. Writers/contributors to this edition include Francis Halsall, Sarah Kelleher, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Adrian Duncan, Ed Krčma, Stag & Deer, Alan Boardman, The Domestic Godless, Marta Fernández Calvo, the NSF, and Sarah O’Brien.

Publications will be available for €5 at the NSF. The hard copy edition is also available in various locations in Dublin (check the website for details) and at the following locations:

Cork: Lewis Glucksman Gallery Bookshop
Limerick: Ormston House

If you would like a copy posted to you (€6.50 including postage), please email: papervisualart@gmail.com

www.papervisualart.com

‘VESTIGE’

Please join us for the opening of VESTIGE, the exhibition of the Creative Campus programme 2013

Friday April 26th, 6pm – 8pm
Level 3, The Square Shopping Centre

Exhibition continues Sat/Sun: 12pm – 4pm, Mon – Fri: 11am – 4.30pm

Artists:
Dzifa Hollwey, Fiona Campbell, Rob Carroll, Stephen Considine, Cameron Ridyard, Louis Deacy, Edel Fenelon, Kieran Bollard, Siobhan Fitzsimons, Emily Veale

Participating Schools:
Deansrath Community College; Firhouse Community College; Colaiste Brid Presentation Secondary School; Moyle Park College; Mount Seskin Community College

Creative Campus is a site-specific arts programme that supports students of the NCAD as emerging artists in the creation of a multi-faceted art project that engages with diverse audiences. The project also engages with second level students from schools throughout South Dublin County as part of the NCAD Access programme. Creative Campus was initiated in 2010 by Tallaght Community Arts and NOISE Dublin, the Youth Arts Programme of South Dublin County Council’s Arts Office. The 2013 programme has fostered a new partnership with the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) with the generous support of The Square Shopping Centre, Tallaght.

Creative Campus is managed and curated by artists Chloe Brenan and Siobhan Carroll.

The Art Academy and Knowing – Seminar at IMMA

This friday IMMA host a seminar called “The Art Academy and Knowing”:

A seminar to explore the role of the art academy and its relationship to knowing from a range of perspectives, including philosophy, psychoanalysis and art theory and practice.This features a keynote presentation by Nikolaus Hirsch. Other speakers include Mick Wilson (Head of Valand Academy, Sweden), Francis Halsall (Lecturer, Co-ordinator, MA -Art in the Contemporary World, NCAD), Sinead Hogan (Lecturer, IADT), Cathy Haynes (Curator and Co-founder, The School of Life, London), Ian Miller (psychologist and psychoanalyst) and others.

Friday 19 April, 1.00pm – 4.30pm, Lecture Room, IMMA Off-Site at NCH

Tickets are free of charge, but must be booked on the IMMA website

‘First Awake Moment’

First Awake Moment
Ingrid Lyons, Lesley Ann O’Connell, Kathy Tynan

http://www.pallasprojects.org/

Opening Thursday, April 18, 6-8pm

Group discussion on the exhibition
Friday, April 19, 6pm

The exhibition will be open from Friday, April 18 – Sunday, April 21, from 12pm to 6pm each day.

The Project Space at PP/S is an open, accessible and versatile space that bridges studio and exhibition practice.
It features throughout the year, internally–curated projects, talks and events, alongside external, artist–initiated projects, workshops, performances or large-scale studio use.
The Project Space is intended to allow access for creative, motivated and professionally minded individuals and groups working within contemporary visual art and like-minded fields, to experiment with presenting their work and engage with audiences; to work in the context of a space with a dedicated tradition – ongoing over a seventeen year period – towards do-it- yourself initiatives and the professional development of emerging artists.

Project Space at PP/S Pallas Projects/Studios 115–117 The Coombe Dublin 8
Project Space at PP/S April 18 – 21

First Awake Moment documents a period in time in which Ingrid Lyons, Lesley Ann O’Connell, and Kathy Tynan have been independently focusing on and developing their painting and drawing practices. This exhibition acts as a pause for contemplation and recognition of the past year and reflects on things learned, forgotten, lost, and discovered.

Ingrid Lyons’ drawings describe a personal and contemporary experience of landscape and place. Hazy views recalled from the windows of moving cars and trains are rendered with intimacy and intricacy but they remain atmospherically remote, ghostly, and impermanent. This feeling of movement and passing time creates distance between the viewer and the remembered scenes, heightened by layers of cinematic shadow and light. The places and situations in Lyons’ drawings hint at a search for belonging from a position of uncertainty and detachment.
Lyons is currently undertaking the Art in the Contemporary World MA at NCAD.

Lesley Ann O’Connell’s paintings begin with acts of rigorous looking and focused observational drawing. A process of decision making that is intuitive and fluid emerges with the introduction of paint, and the outside world becomes internalised, surrendering to a multitude of textures and colours. The latest of O’Connell’s paintings document the transitory phase of a return to the family home – an environment in which surrounding objects can be at once familiar and alien. The patterns of a carpet or the way light falls in a certain room are among the many influences that form a wealth of conflicts and sensibilities.
O’Connell is currently undertaking an MFA at NCAD.

Kathy Tynan makes energetic and compassionate paintings of friends and places of personal significance. Frozen within a moment, figures and buildings merge into their surroundings as the wind whips up leaves and clouds career and swirl through the sky. Tynan’s concentrated yet carefree technique allows essence, mood, and affection to emerge from sometimes unintentional gestures. By embracing these imperfections and uncertainties, the heart of her subjects is revealed, and a more open and magical experience within each moment blooms.
Tynan is a resident artist in Pallas Studios.

While there are signs of doubt, anxiety, and awkwardness in each of the artists’ works there is a mutual understanding of nature and landscape, home, the familiar and the everyday, memory, and friendship. First Awake Moment provides a space for all of these elements to come together and to be considered in this way for a brief moment in time.

The artists would like to extend a very special thanks to our friend and colleague Michael Hill, for his support and guidance throughout the planning of this exhibition.

Please use the following contact details for any enquiries:
Michael Hill – thatmichael@gmail.com
Ingrid Lyons – ingridlyons@hotmail.com
Lesley Ann O’Connell – ilikeirishweather@gmail.com
Kathy Tynan – kathy.tynster@gmail.com

SCUM

Lily Cahill and Rob Murphy, both recent graduates of the MA ACW course, have a new exhibition opening in the Joinery on Wednesday evening of this week. There is an opening reception from 6-8pm and then an after-show party in the Dice Bar at 9. Here’s a link to something that might or might not tell you something about what to expect.

http://bit.ly/XlG4cP

The show runs for a week until the 24th of April.

http://www.thejoinery.org/events/scum

Dublin Day-ennial 2013 NCAD/RCA

Update: We will be starting at 10:30 in the IFI cafe on Eustace St. Not Braadstone as stated below!

Students and tutors of the ACW Masters@Visual Culture NCAD are joining Brian Dillon and Jeremy Millar from the RCA, London and their students of Critical Writing for a Day-ennial on Tuesday 16th of April 2013.

The day will include viewing exhibitions, with the opportunity to discuss the displayed work with the curators, and visiting artists studios. There is a considerable diversity of work on show in Dublin at the moment ranging from that of prestigious, established international and Irish artists to new emerging artists.

Schedule:

10am: Broadstone Studios: Visits

11am: IMMA @Earlsfort Terrace: Tino Sehgal.

12pm: RHA: ‘SKIN: An Artistic Atlas‘: includes John Coplans, Robert Ballagh,
Andres Serrano, Sigalit Landau, Jeanne Silverthorne, Jessica Robbins, Gwen
Hardie, Marlene Dumas, Barrie Cooke, Dorothy Cross, Phillip Pearlstein,
Robert Mapplethorpe, Nicholas Nixon, Hannah Wilke, Cara Phillips, Cecily
Brennan, Byron Kim, Mary Kelly, Ariana Page Russell, Shirin Neshat, Spencer
Tunick, Dennis Oppenheim

1pm lunch

2pm: Douglas Hyde Gallery: Ben Rivers & Simone Kappeler. Director John
Hutchinson or one of the staff from the gallery will come and say a few
words.

3pm: Temple Bar Gallery: Seamus Nolan plus studio visit(s).

4.30pm: Project Arts Centre: Tessa Giblin talk.

5pm: Kevin Kavanagh Gallery: Paul McKinley.

Beauty in the Everyday

Roisin Power Hackett writes about the work of artist Liam Gough.

Don’t worry. This is how life is supposed to be.
Liam Gough

Movement is the genesis of Liam Gough’s art practice. On visiting his studio at NCAD, John’s Lane, Liam told me a story about a recent day in the studios. He was sitting drinking his morning cup of jasmine tea when all of a sudden he felt the impulse to get up from his chair and walk out the escape exit doors of his studio. So he did this. He found himself outside. A woman from across the road was staring at him out a window. Liam then realised she wasn’t staring at him. She was staring at another door into the John’s Lane Building. Liam decided then to go through this door. He found himself by the stair case. Since he had never been up on top of the roof of building he resolved to see how high the stairs would take him. When he reached the top, he came out onto a roof balcony. On the ledge of the balcony he found two half smoked cigarettes. He took these with him down the stairs again. The story then continues with a walk down to the Liffey, where Liam smoked another cigarette. On his way back up from the Liffey to John’s Lane he found a dead bumble bee, which he took with him. After telling me this story he then gestured to his studio wall where there were two drawings of the same bumble bee, and both cigarettes were pinned up. Walking is how Liam forages for the subjects of his art. Continue reading…

Wine Soak no.8: ROTATOR

Our wine correspondent Jakob Ligvine Kreek found himself spinning out of control at the opening of ROTATOR a series of performances and events by Ruth Clinton & Niamh Moriarty that took place at Pallas Projects/Studios. During the month of March 2013.

On the cool dry evening of March 1st, during one of my merry jaunts in search of new adventures, I was traversing the district of the Coombe and Liberties in Dublin. In these dark and winding streets formerly the feudal lands of Lord Meath one can still see the remnants of the Brabazon family’s philanthropic activities. On the Long Lane the edifice of the Meath Hospital still lingers and the peculiar granite entrance portico to the Coombe lying in Hospital stands in defiance of passing time. The ruined Church of St. Luke’s built in 1709 and burnt down in 1986 also reminds us of those histories and alternative geographies that have become lost to us. I found myself on the corner of St luke’s Street and the Coombe looking toward the carcass of the derelict church when the air became filled with the pungent odour of burning wood. There was a strange underlying dampness that saturated the air like the stagnant vapours of a history trying to suffocate the present. Further along the street by the hoarding of a vacant lot my nostrils flared as the air became condensed by the sensation of being close to a large body of water. However, there was nothing to be seen from the street. A peculiar wavin drain pipe attached to the hoarding caught my eye and on further investigation it turned out to be a periscope. To my surprise it revealed a view of a large pond in the excavated crater in the vacant lot on the other side of the fence. Something was afoot! Continue reading…

Sounds like Art

Sounds like Art: a conversation with improvised sound interludes.
A performance / conversation with Ed Devane / Francis Halsall / Anthony Kelly and David Stalling.
Organised by Miranda Driscoll as part of a ‘conversations’ series for First Thursdays Dublin at the Joinery. Thurs 4th April 7pm sharp.

www.thejoinery.org

www.farpointrecordings.com