Pallas Projects - Artist–Initiated Projects

Artist–Initiated Projects – 2009

During the summer on 2009 the PCP curated programme took a break, and the gallery was made available to external artists’ projects, providing a much-needed platform for experimental work. These projects were selected from a pool of proposals that were made to the gallery following an open submission call out.

“Latent Connections” was an exhibition of work by three artists, Sinéad Curran, Elaine Hurley and Suzannah Vaughan, addressing the tensions between possibility and non action, presented by means of light, video and temporary fragile structures.

The Artists in this exhibition reconstruct and re-present social situations and unrealised spaces as a means of re-addressing these concerns or making visible that which has become invisible through a lack of implementation, an impossibility or an over-familiarity.

The culmination of a year-long project, this exhibition of Áine Macken’s work presented hundreds of small paintings of faces, each contorted, experiencing extremes of emotion – ecstasy, pleasure, torture, grief, terror and joy. Her practice is strongly informed by theoretical considerations of beauty, jouissance and the ethical implications of the pursuit of narcissism (heavily influenced by Rococo portraitures of ecstasy).

Áine invited a number of artists including Michelle Considine, Catherine Harty and Gráinne Galvin, theoretician/philosopher Carolyne Quinn, creative writer/curator Emma Dwan O’Reilly and burlesque performer Miss Bella A Go Go to respond to this ideas of fluidity, femininity, sexuality and terror. These will include collaborative works, independent pieces taking theories of Áine’s work as points of departure, and a subversive burlesque performance by Miss Bella A Go Go on the opening night.

Trace was the inaugural show of a new artists’ collective called ‘10to12artists’, formed by graduates of IADT in 2008. The show featured new works in a variety of media including drawing, painting, photography, video and installation. The works for Trace were selected by Niall Flaherty, who is a practicing artist and educator, a founder member of Blackletter Artists Group and currently a member of Monster Truck Gallery’s curatorial team.

10to12artists are: Lorraine Byrne, Gráinne Brady, Pamela de Brí, Charles Henihan, Jacinta Hughes, Denise Kevany, John Murray, Joe Nagle, Roma Przedpelska, Ann Turpin and Mary Quinn.

Say ‘ello to your Uncle Chop Chop was a series of absurd pictures by Dan Atkins. Stuck somewhere between the Far Side and Francis Bacon, the art is a look at contemporary life and the knock-on effect of our consumerism and greed.

Colm Desmond continues his investigation into the intersecting, and often conflicting, discourses around formalist, post-minimal and object-based art. Assemblages of randomly found, recycled forms are displayed in mirrored vitrines to create tensions between the elegant, the formal and the degraded. This adaptable, collaged aesthetic points to a baroque-like anxiety of form. A degraded aesthetic alludes to the awkward position of the autonomous self in making art. The artist invites you to consider the contradiction of in/elegant formalism.

Gooseberries is a visual investigation into the nature of meaning. The idea stems from the eponymous Anton Chekhov short story.

By reducing the notion of meaning to simple geometric shapes the artist is able to make a general comment on its nature. This objective proposal is presented in tandem with a more subjective thread, thus addressing the artist’s question above; Does it matter? The work comprised of plate sculptures, planar solid sculptures, technical drawings and a textural drawing.

Play – Group exhibition organised by Pallas Contemporary Projects Intern Programme Emer Bermingham, Aoife Doolin, Niamh Dunphy, Fiona O’Keefe, Moya Revins, Emma Rowe, Neil Ryan.

The theme ‘Play’ is used to draw together the diverse works and practices of a group of young and emerging artists, writers and curators all brought together by their internship at Pallas Contemporary Projects.

‘Play’ seeks to open up the gallery as a ‘playground of ideas’, in which each participant has interpreted the theme in their own. Either evoking childhood memories and experiences to transport us back to a time of imagination and escapism, or interpreting ‘Play’ in a more sinister way – seeing the journey from youth to adulthood as leaving behind optimism and unlimited possibility for a more ‘realistic’ perspective thus raising issues of the futility of childish idealism and the loss of innocence.

This was the second yearly exhibition of work resulting from the Pallas Contemporary Projects Intern Programme, and was presented alongside the independent summer programme of exhibitions.

This new series of work by Barbara Knezevic In pursuit of a state of uncertainty, marks a departure from performance based temporal practice. The new work is an examination of the potential of materiality and object-hood, utilising fabric, stone, magnets, weather balloons and wax. The objects display the tensions between physical forces of gravity, mass, air and magnetism. Failure or the potential to fail is present in the temporary nature of the materials used. Often they have a limited ‘life’ where the objects evolve and change as they lose their buoyancy and mass over time, taking on an element of kinesis. Crucially these objects describe psychological or emotional states, mercurial and fleeting.

Cannon Fodder*
Caroline Doolin, Nora Duggan, Gerard Erraught, Fiona Marron and Serena Teehan

Cannon Fodder*, a collective of five emerging Dublin based artists, was marshalled out of shared interests in 2007 and has continued to evolve by means of regular discussions and debate. In the past, conversations have interrogated issues of current art/curatorial practice and how/why art engages in a wider social context. The support network this collective provides serves to foster individual and collaborative art practises as hetrogeneous as the individuals themselves.