LANDING PLACE   A WEEKEND OF EVENTS AT PIGEON HOUSE HOTEL & PRECINCT Saturday 25th May 2013, 11:00 – 19:00 Sunday 26th May 2013, 14:00 – 19:00   Dublin Electricity Generating Station, Pigeon House Hotel and environs. Image courtesy of Dublin City Heritage Office.

NEW WORK BY SVEN ANDERSON, AOIFE DESMOND, FIONA MCDONALD, EMA NIK THOMAS

Following five months of collaborative work, small research events and the activation of a studio space at the Pigeon House Hotel on the Poolbeg Peninsula in Dublin Bay, we’re delighted to invite you to attend a series of events for Landing Place.

Over the weekend of Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th of May 2013, Landing Place presents four newly commissioned contemporary art works in sound, film, architectural intervention and performance, by Sven Anderson, Aoife Desmond, Fiona McDonald and Ema Nik Thomas. These works explore the Pigeon House Precinct and its context in the Poolbeg Peninsula through ideas of activation and access. A talk series on Saturday afternoon from 2pm until 5pm will open up a discussion about the site and the project through presentations on contemporary art, heritage, urban planning and ideas of access. Context specific hospitality treatment will be provided by Jennie Moran with Luncheonette.

Landing Place is a Commonage commissioned project, curated by Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch and developed in partnership with Dublin City Council Heritage Office.

Full description here

How do I there there? Directions, map, transport

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

SVEN ANDERSON
[sound installation]
Sat 25th, 11:00 – 14:00 and 17:00 – 19:00, at 30 minute intervals
Sun 26th, 14:00 – 19:00, at 30 minute intervals

AOIFE DESMOND
Passage Migrants [film work]

duration: 30 mins

Sat 25th, 12:30 and 18:00

Sun 26th, 15:00 and 17:30

FIONA MCDONALD

TRADINGTIME [architectural intervention]

Sat 25th, 11:00 – 19:00
Sun 26th, 14:00 – 19:00

EMA NIK THOMAS
Lacuna [performance]
duration: 2 hours
Sat 25th, 12:00 – 14:00 and 17:00 – 19:00
Sun 26th, 16:00 – 18:00

TALK SERIES 14:00 – 17:00, SAT 25TH MAY

Speakers include: Fiona McDonald, Charles Duggan, Jesse Jones, Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch, Grainne Shaffrey and more.

An afternoon talk series to consider the contemporary significance of the Pigeon House site from a number of perspectives: contemporary art, urban planning, public access and heritage.

The talk series event is free, but booking is essential, please contact: info@commonagecallan.com

LUNCHEONETTE [Landing Place]

Context specific hospitality treatment by Jennie Moran serving food and drinks.

Not free but not expensive. Open: Sat 11:00 – 19:00 and Sunday 14:00 – 19:00.

Landing Place has been funded through an Arts Council Visual Arts Project Award, and supported by Dublin City Council Heritage Office and the Dublin City Public art Programme under Strand 4 – City Contexts.

Image: Jonas, oil on gesso panel, 35 x 45cm, 2013 Courtesy of the artist

Stephen Loughman

Interiors

April 25 – May 25, 2013

Kevin Kavanagh
Chancery Lane
Dublin 8

Stephen Loughman’s latest exhibition takes it’s title from  Woody Allen’s 1978 film, “Interiors” which is considered to be heavily influenced by the  work of Ingmar Bergman.

Bergman’s films such as “Winter Light”, “Cries and Whispers”, “Fanny and Alexander” and “Scenes from a Marriage”, are the source for the paintings in Loughman’s latest series Interiors. The paintings depict a single frame of film and reference sub narratives of suicide, illness, clerical abuse and marital breakdown. By referencing these narratives and painting a single frame of film,  Loughman creates a new context for these images. Each painting is titled using original Swedish dialogue from the respective film and brings to mind another famous Swedish export.

‘Stephen Loughman visually reinforces that strangely separate quality in which we experience our lives as part of some other narrative. We come to life in these landscapes which have been taken from realities elsewhere, versions of ourselves that have pre-existed us in imaginary form, in another medium, a cross-reference, fictionalised somewhere in the past by culture and commerce.’

Text by Hugo Hamilton, taken from Nothing is Real, Stephen Loughman & Mark O’Kelly (2008)

Stephen Loughman (b.1964 Dublin) lives and works in Dublin. His work is currently featured in Exiles curated by Alison Pilkington at the Lab, Foley St., Dublin. Loughman continues to work on his project The Fisherman’s Widow. Recent Solo shows include; VOLTANY 12, solo presentation, New York (2012); Fisherman’s Widow, Cake Contemporary Arts, Kildare, Ireland (2010) and Our Victory, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2009).

Recent  Group shows include; Last, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2012); Collecting the New: IMMA, Dublin and What Happens Next is a Secret curated by Marguerite O’ Molloy ,IMMA, Dublin (2010), Surface and Reality, Kilkenny Arts Festival curated by Oliver Dowling (2010) something tells me it’s all happening at the zoo curated by Davey Moor, Kevin Kavanagh (2010) and Summer Show Galerie Bugdahn and Kaimer, Düsseldorf, Germany (2009).

He has received numerous Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland and his work is in private and public collections, including: Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Arts Council of Ireland and The Office of Public Works.

Further information:

www.kevinkavanagh.ie

Image: Bit Symphony 2009, courtesy of the artist

Further information:

www.thegoodroom.com/Site/news.html

www.rubicongallery.ie

The Future Perfect: We Are Here

Rubicon Projects

Rue Tenbosch 74

1050 Brussels, Belgium

March 7 – April 13, 2013

The Future Perfect: We Are Here will feature contemporary artists, working in different media, some of whom express idealistic and utopian future formulae and others who position varies from post-modern skepticism to the dystopian. These artists share an international perspective but also reflect the concerns of Irish people today. Our culture is one of the key signifiers of Ireland and, as a place of creativity and innovation with a tenacious and resourceful young population, The Future Perfect may point to some new ways forward.

Exhibiting Artists: Anita Groener, Ronnie Hughes, Eithne Jordan, Barbara Knezevic, Nevan Lahart, Niamh McCann, Siobhan McGibbon, Garrett Phelan.

Further information:

www.niamhmccann.com

www.rubicongallery.ie

Operation Turquoise

Paul McKinley
21st March – 20th April | Opening: 21st March at 6pm
Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Chancery Lane, Dublin 8.

When Francisco Goya etched Yo Lo Vi across the bottom of one of the harrowing images from his Disasters of War series (1810-12), he was making a declaration about the primacy of presence in the authenticity of narrative. “I saw it”, says Goya, therefore you must accept this as truth. These days we realise that it’s not quite that simple. We bring our own agendas to understanding what we see.

Paul McKinley’s Operation Turquoise turns on these dynamics, where seeing isn’t necessarily believing, and each new piece of knowledge changes how we view what is in front of our eyes. Working from photographs, taken in Rwanda, by Trinity College ecologist, Shane McGuinness, McKinley’s closely observed images of this beautiful country are of lush forestry, active volcanoes and exotic flora and fauna: including rare gorillas and the prehistorically knowing face of the ancient shoebill. They are also meditations on the impossibility of ever truly knowing a place.

Today, Rwanda is usually understood through the prism of the 1994 genocide; a framing knowledge that infects every image. Did something terrible happen in this place? Under these epiphyte-hung trees? In this clearing? Dark tourism is a booming industry, but what can going in person reveal? And what do travellers hope to discover or to feel? We bring our own stories to the places we visit, and a tree is nothing more than a tree until it is shaded by our own imaginations. Paul McKinley’s paintings are beautifully wrought, stunning reflections on seeing and meaning.

www.kevinkavanagh.ie/paul-mckinley

For further informations:

maryafitzgerald.wordpress.com

www.advancedgraphics.co.uk/exhibitions/exhibitions_cuairt.htm

Exiles – Rhona Byrne / Mark Garry / James Hanley / Stephen Loughman / Ronan McCrea / Ruby Wallis

The Lab, Foley Street, Dublin 1

March 15 – April 20, 2013

Curated by Alison Pilkington for The Five Lamps Festival

As part of the Five Lamps Arts Festival theme commemorating the centenary of the Dublin Lockout of 1913, artist Alison Pilkington has brought together a diverse group of artists to consider the idea of being ‘locked out’ as a metaphor for the human condition.
The title of the show, ‘Exiles’, alludes to a form of self imposed ‘lock out’, but also refers to a state of existence apart from one’s home or perhaps, oneself. Another curatorial inspiration for the exhibition was the words of the poet Arthur Rimbaud. In 1871,  the then seventeen year old Rimbaud wrote, “I is another”, acknowledging the collective human experience whilst referring to the self as a position outside the individual. The artists involved have produced a rich variety of work that responds to the idea of being locked out of society, of the self or in more esoteric ways, existence itself.

Rhona Byrne’s audio piece explores changing perceptions of self, body and personal experience in relation to space. By listing object or situational phobias, the work addresses the complexities and subjectivity of our spatial lives and how anxiety and fear can alter perceptions of place.

Mark Garry’s practice blends a variety of formats such as the sonic and the tactile with the visual. His video piece is part of an ongoing project that deals with the physiological, psychological and social realities of being a blind person in contemporary Ireland and subtly explores the predominance of visual linguistics in the world.

James Hanley is a well regarded portrait painter and for this exhibition is presenting painting and drawing depicting some of the Communist era statues exiled to a snow-covered statue park on the outskirts of Budapest. Marx, Engels, Lenin, famous personalities, heroes and soldiers of the Red Army in monumental form are now banished to the suburbs. There, their physical glories remain but their former individual and very public impact has been changed.

Stephen Loughman has produced a miniature diorama for the exhibition, a fictional scene from the Hermitage Museum in which a figure looks at a painting, the piece addresses the activity of looking and prompts a self conscious, existential awareness of it.

An iconic photograph of the Dublin Lock out forms the Basis of Ronan McCrea’s piece. The work consists of a sequence of projected 35mm slides showing detailed enlargements of the photograph at times to the point of abstraction or obliteration. The sequence of images accompanied by an oblique narrative subtly alludes to media consumption of the image and of the history of the event, tracked and contained through photographic images.

Ruby Wallis’ work is a personal ethnography of growing up in Coolorta, a community in the Burren Co Clare. The unfixability of meaning and the impossibility of representation are at the heart of her practice, which takes the form of a series of experimental and philosophical attempts to represent place through film photography, sound and text.

The Five Lamps festival will run from 9th to 25th April in various venues in the Dublin 1 area.

www.fivelampsarts.ie

www.ronanmccrea.com

www.kevinkavanagh.ie/stephen-loughman