09/10/25—25/10/25
Gary Farrelly—Quasi-Autonomous Stitch
Opening:
6–8pm Thursday 9th October
Exhibition runs:
Friday 10th – Saturday 25th October
Pallas Projects/Studios are pleased to present Gary Farrelly—Quasi-Autonomous Stitch, the seventh exhibition of our 2025 Artist-Initiated Projects programme.
Prestatement:
Gary Farrelly’s first solo exhibition in Ireland in fifteen years, Quasi-Autonomous Stitch, takes its name from a sewing procedure devised as a method of overwriting and absorbing images and surfaces. The works here are restless, shifting between seams, carbon traces, labels, blueprints, photographs, and logbooks. At stake are languages of construction, obsolescence, staging, and transmission—creased, overwritten, redacted, repaired, forced into proximity.
The exhibition unfolds as a ledger of obsession: Dublin’s office blocks recoded as speculative archive, Ireland’s Eurovision stagings reframed as a chronicle of economy and conflict, a postal dispatch to Bosnia stretched across decades, and a stitched image of an athletic male body drawn from the Beefcake Hunter films. Across these thresholds, approval is entangled with delay, concealment with revelation, precision with collapse, affection with coercion. Time itself seems to rub toward disappearance.
An accompanying artist talk on October 25th at 5pm traces world-building, postal devotion, and drawing as a persuasive act within a practice of obsessive accumulation.
Image: Straightsploitation series (2023)
Biography:
Gary Farrelly is a Brussels-based visual artist and researcher working with themes of enchantment, red tape, disinformation, haunted infrastructures, and architectural erotics. His performances combine an authoritative tone with fly-by-night storytelling, while his inventory-driven material practice incorporates collage, photography, embroidery, and print. Farrelly is the co-founder of the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (O.J.A.I.), a para-intelligence agency in collaboration with German artist Chris Dreier, investigating self-institution—the creation of fictive or speculative organizational frameworks.
He is also the co-founder and curator of FLYKTIG/Fugitive, an off-grid performance platform in Valdres, Norway. A graduate of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and LUCA School of Arts, he completed post-MA research at a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies) in Brussels. Farrelly is a professor at La Cambre ENSAV in Brussels and a Visiting Researcher at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg. His artworks and performances, both personal and collaborative, have been presented in contexts including Hugh Lane Gallery (Dublin), Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture (Maastricht), Salzburger Kunstverein, Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati), Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (London), and Publiek Park (Plantentuin Meise).
Gary Farrelly is supported by Fingal Arts Office.
garyfarrelly.com/ | @gary__farrelly
Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 8 x 3-week exhibitions taking place from March-November 2025. This unique programme of funded, artist-initiated projects selected via open call is highly accessible to artists, with a focus on early career, emerging artists and recent graduates. Projects are supplemented with artists' talks, texts, workshops or performances, and gallery visits by colleges and local schools.
