A Setting—Imogen Brady, Cará Donaghey, Dáire McEvoy, Megan Robinson

“The installations transform the exhibition space into a space of reflection. They rely on its physical dimensions and limits to create a moment of coherence. The diverse materials on display are linked together through the unity of place and time created within the confines of a setting.”—Jan Verwoert, Untitled (Experience of Place), London, Koenig Books, 2003

The geographical Irish landscape and the broad internal landscape of the mind each hold a sense of importance for the four artists. As they are all from different areas, working in and around Dublin has led them to explore the city itself but also examine other territories; their hometowns, the virtual world, their inner places, all with a different mindset. Considering this, a subtle sense of surrealism is at play within the work presented.

Imogen manipulates and optimises her film photography, offering a censored glimpse of her existence in Dublin. This contemplation of the urban juxtaposes with Cará’s work, which uses the landscape of Donegal and its personal & public histories as a beginning point. Megan uses imagined spaces to explore the relationships and tensions created between different objects and materials. For Dáire, Dublin city hasn’t been taken at face value. The banal, everyday urban space is considered, and reimagined in a stylised colourful manner.

Biographies:

Imogen Brady, born in Greater Manchester, is a final-year BA (Hons) Fine Art & Art History student at Kingston School of Art, London. Through the Erasmus+ study abroad programme she undertook a three-month work placement with PP/S at the end of 2017, leaving with a captured imagination and a wealth of new ideas. With an interest in moving-image technology and documentation, Imogen has created her own archive of her time spent in Ireland. The visual vocabulary of the archive is evident in her use of older display mechanisms, proposing a precarious conversation over a non-linear span of time; exploring nostalgia for another place and the distance between technology and real-life. These investigations are juxtaposed with a contemporary methodology and her works in A Setting form the basis of an ongoing project.

Cará Donaghey is an artist from Buncrana, Co. Donegal. She graduated from NCAD in 2017 with a BA (Hons) in Print & Visual Culture, and is the recipient of Black Church Print Studio’s John Kelly RHA Graduate Award and the Clancy Quay studio residency sponsored by NCAD & Kennedy Wilson. She has been involved as a volunteer with PP/S since September 2017. Cará works with the term ‘the archive’ in a flexible and contemporary sense. Her practice focuses on the operative aspects of archiving - collecting, preserving, and mediating images, drawings, and objects from, or based on Co. Donegal. In A Setting, she has considered the recorded evidence of Early Bronze-Age remains of a cremation burial, found during a site-dig in her neighbourhood. The charcoal-rich sediment, found with six sherds of pottery, bone fragments, and three unworked pieces of quartz, have provided a grounding point for her work.

Dáire McEvoy, a Dublin visual artist, is concerned with the interaction between people and the urban areas in which they inhabit by representing them through the form of abstract paintings. The use of motifs and bright colours can almost be seen throughout the works as he highlights 'buffing' (to paint over it with a flat colour) as a form of control by Society.

Megan Robinson graduated with a BA (Hons) in Art from IADT in 2017. Her paintings, which stem from multiple drawings and found natural forms, often take on anthropomorphic or ambiguous qualities and through the use of colour, create a surrealist, otherworldly quality. Her new work Cracks, a short film starring artist Caitríona Ní Threasaigh explores the interactions between architectural places, memories and time. The tactile qualities of the paint and fluid like movements are used to bring us on a journey into a dream-like state.

Pallas Projects/Studios as an entity encourages artists to experiment and take risks. Their openness has encouraged these four emerging artists to get involved and engage with a creative and productive contemporary art space. With this in mind, they have confidently taken a leap in a new direction in their individual practices.

Instagram: @imogenbrady @caradonaghey @meganrobinson23 @the93mc


Website: imogenbrady.tumblr.com caradonaghey.tumblr.com meganrobinsonweb.wordpress.com