Artist–initiated Projects 2010

During the summer the PCP curated programme takes a break, and the gallery is 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.

Preface
Miranda Driscoll, Adrian Duncan, David Eager-Maher, Tonia Larem, Ciara McMahon, Róisín McNamee, Laragh Pittman & Kathy Tynan

Preface arose from a preoccupation with the travels between art and literature, and the spiralling, labyrinthine and multiple points at which these meet. Heated discussions about the interstitial links between art and literature among the artists informed this preoccupation and gave the impetus to present Preface. The artists approach the visual by taking writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, W.G. Sebald and Samuel Beckett as starting points, adopting fictive or narrative elements into the artwork or presenting the text as visual. The various ways to negotiate the literary in the visual are explored through text, drawings, photography and installation.

Prior to the opening reception there will be an informal discussion with Declan Long (critical writer and co-ordinator of the Art in the Contemporary World Masters Programme, NCAD), Greg Baxter (fiction writer and essayist) and the artists involved. This will start at 5pm and is open to all. A limited edition publication will accompany the exhibition and will be available on the opening night.

Full listings:

Angle of Decline
Connor Grogan

This exhibition explores the linear nature of time, and how we perceive its effect through decay, progression and evolution. Grogan use images of navigation, nature and technology to illustrate these ideas, drawing on their history, similarities and collisions.

Using styles and forms echoing draftsmanship and scientific diagrams, Grogan creates linear systems within his work, controlling and shaping areas of disorder. Currently, he work primarily in graphite. Fascinated by mark making and line, Conor works into the paper with pencils before building layers of graphite to create inverted lines and a rich texture of worked and re-worked space.

Grogan has shown work at group shows in Melbourne and has shown video work at the Goethe Institute in Dublin, as well as at a small film festival in Sweden. This exhibition was recently shown at a gallery in Melbourne and is Grogan’s first solo show. He is now delighted to make it an international event, bringing it to Pallas Contemporary Projects.

Monument
Damien O’Connell

Monument is an exhibition of new work by Damien O’Connell. Here, O’Connell presents the viewer with a tableau of curious situations: a series of miniature constructs with intertwining elements of absurd narrative. The work primarily refers to historical incidences of architectural folly, while simultaneously evoking ludic disruptions of scale and ambition.

O’Connell’s work is an ongoing investigation into closed spaces, objects and minds. Within the work, he reveals a series of connections, which amount to an open-ended model of thought. To this end, scale models and drawings are used to fold and unfold an elusive narrative. Contingent signifiers are used to forge ironic interplay and associations. For example, through repetition, chairs become hapless provocateurs: an accepted totality within the miniature tableau but a bewildering conundrum for the viewer.

O’Connell is an MA graduate artist of Central Saint Martins and Limerick School of Art and Design. Upcoming group shows include, Worlds within Worlds in Bearspace, and Tomorrow People in Elevator Gallery. He currently lives and works in London.

The Marvellous Nature of Underground Places
Clare-Louise Bligh

The Marvellous Nature of Underground Places is an installation by Clare-Louise Bligh. Bligh’s art practice explores the relationships between inner and outer worlds. Her imagery draws on notions of memory, death and philosophy, often dipping into the well of archaic imagery that is embedded in the human psyche. Using delicate visual metaphors her creations stage the scene for narratives, leading the viewer through the connections between dreaming and dwelling.

It is from this plane of the daydream, influenced by external everyday realities, that Bligh’s work is created. Her art, at times highly fragile and often with a fantastical utopian dimension, brings together nature and society into combinations that imply harmony and unity but can end up being unnerving or dissonant.

Her sculptural work seems to have spiralled out of the realm of the imaginary into the space of the real, like a short-circuited fairy tale.

DYAD
Two installations by Dáinne Nic Aoidh and Eve Parnell

Curated by Aoife O’Toole

“The senses are the organs through which the live creature participates directly in the on-goings of the world about him” – John Dewey, philosopher and psychologist

Dyad is an exploration of how the experiential is transmitted between viewer and artwork; dealing with aspects of experience, atmosphere and the senses. A release of some sort, at once explicit and surreptitious exists in the interstice between viewer and artwork. In Greek philosophy dyad refers to the principle of two-ness or otherness; in this case two artworks juxtaposing sensory and cognitive reactions.

Parnell plays with the gallery space to explore ideas of boundaries and scale, introducing elements of compulsion and revulsion, Nic Aoidh refers to the gallery as “the holding space” which leads to a place of incubation that evolves into a creative field, both spaces allowing the processes of that which is unconscious to become conscious; thereby leading to a metamorphosis.

Dáinne Nic Aoidh is a multidisciplinary artist. Recent shows include: Constellations, This is Not a Shop Dublin; Winter Salon, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; Platform Arts, Emerging Artists, RDS. Nic Aoidh will collaborate with sound designer Ed Devane for Dyad. As well as her own practice, Eve Parnell is a member of art group Tondo. Recent shows include: Tondo @ Drogheda Train Station; Tondo @ Pearse St Library Dublin; Leinster Gallery Summer Group Show Dublin, all 2010.