The Woods is set in the off-site Limerick City Gallery of Istabraq Hall. The show features work from The National Collection of Contemporary Drawing. In conjunction with the exhibition, Curator Mary Conlon, has asked three artists from the Creative Limerick scheme to also participate. The press release explains: “A year after the launch of the initiative, Creative Limerick also promotes the creative potential in the city, having developed an exemplary model in negotiating the use of slack spaces for use in artistic and cultural activities…. Read More »
A Model For Collective Change
May Day saw the long awaited re-opening of The Model after a two year renovation project. The event aimed to re-affirm Sligo’s position as a cultural centre for the North West, and was a night packed with nostalgia and optimism for the arts. The first exhibition was a show called Dorm, which showcased Irish and international art collectives, presented as an art fair parody. The opening night was an elaborate, inter-active art event, which invited the public to ‘sleep over’ in the gallery on custom… Read More »
REVIEW: Package From China
“To have read Das Kapital in the 1970s wasn’t a complete waste of time because it has helped me understand China in the 1990’s.” – Jan Wong Red China Blues, 1996 “To Get Rich Is… (around the corner and on the opposite wall) Glorious”. Each letter rises above eye level and works as a separate sculptural piece. They are comprised of hundreds of cheap everyday materials… all plastic and garish. The subject of this exhibition is former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Deng Xioping. Along… Read More »
Review: Video Killed The Radio Star
Breda Lynch ‘The End’ animation still, courtesy 126 Gallery. A paradigm shift may be personal, cultural or global and may engender fear as long-standing established norms evaporate. History is littered with such significant changes in science, religion, technology, art and politics. The 126 Gallery based in Galway presented its membership with the challenge of responding to this theme and as a result 14 artists were selected for the exhibition at the RHA Gallery in Dublin. Within the history of entertainment Vaudeville theatres were once a… Read More »
Tulca 2009
Tulca 2009 Our need for consolation is impossible to satiate Curated by Helen Carey November 6 – 21, 2009 by Simon Fleming Working my way through this year’s video heavy Tulca I couldn’t help but think what a strange theme for a festival. How was Tulca going to address this and why is it impossible to fill? And what did it have to do with this year’s roster of artists? So, with that insatiable need for comforting in mind I began my tour. On the… Read More »
REVIEW: Fragile Absolutes
On the ground floor gallery off of IMMA’s courtyard, the viewer enters a carefully constructed and haphazard installation called Death Drive (interrupt the circular logic of re-establishing balance because he is the lowest outcast), 2009. The room has plywood ‘strewn’ about it with automobile wheel markings on the surface. The edges of the timber are carefully worked back to give the illusion that the timber has been broken (yet into manageable bits). The piece recalls some of Phelan’s prior work and interest in ‘boy racer’… Read More »
REVIEW: Galway Arts Festival 2009
‘A pastiche of unconnected things’ The Galway Arts Festival (GAF) visual art programme was thin this year. Rejecting many of the local arts organisation’s proposals for inclusion or partnership, the festival even dropped the University’s gallery show from the list in a development that shows a swing away from involvement with contemporary art, socially engaged arts practices and the work of active local art groups and individuals. It is a move towards a lowbrow visual art that encompasses design, advertising, entertainment and easy accessibility… Read More »
Burren College of Art MFA show 2009
Place Placeness Perception Chris Attenborough and Angel O’Leary Burren College of Art MFA Show, Co. Clare April 2009 by Phillina Sun This spring’s earliest and smallest MFA show was to be found deep in the west of Ireland at the Burren College of Art. The two graduates, Angel O’Leary and Chris Attenborough, find common ground with a reduced, if not post-minimal, aesthetic at times, but unsurprisingly they diverge on subject matter and approach. Indeed, this is the nature of all degree and graduate shows, however… Read More »
Review: i-podism: Cultural Promiscuity in the Age of Consumption – Tulca 2008
TULCA, Galway’s annual visual arts festival, usually a time of great excitement in the shortening days of November, was an occasion for disappointment in 2008. The curatorial decisions were bold, but fundamentally conservative, despite a few interesting choices. Still from Jun Nguyen Hatshushiba’s video Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex I had initially assumed that TULCA was a critique of I-Podism (i.e. the super-saturation of images, videos, and music via such technologies as the I-Pod in a period of globalalised capitalism). According… Read More »
Niall de Buitléar
Accumulations Niall de Buitléar 126, Galway August 21 – September 13 2008 by Frank Brannigan “Accumulations is an exhibition of sculpture and drawing that have been produced through the labour intensive accumulation of simple elements. The sense of growth of the work over a period of time is essential” It seems apt to observe this exhibition at 126, which is situated within the matrix of an industrial estate from whose stark utilitarian wholesale outlets, garages, warehouses, machine shops, etc. the artist may have plucked his… Read More »
Linda Quinlan
I’ve seen your bravery and I will follow you there Linda QuinlanGalway Arts CentreJune 6 – July 5, 2008by Frank BranniganCurator and critic Joseph R. Wolin describes Linda Quinlan’s work as “an ensemble of exquisite and precisely calibrated contingency” in the exhibition’s accompanying essay. The challenging range of work in the exhibition: watercolours, assemblage sculpture, photographs and video are elegantly if not sparsely laid out with the implicit intention to give much contemplative space to each piece. Upon entering the space, you sense that you… Read More »