Kerry Guinan—Our Celestial Sphere

Pallas Projects/Studios are pleased to present Kerry Guinan—Our Celestial Sphere the eighth exhibition of our 2019 Artist-Initiated Projects programme.

For this exhibition, visual artist Kerry Guinan presents the art methodology ‘relational socialist realism', which has been a year in development with the support of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Next Generation Award 2018. Guinan is proposing relational socialist realism as a contemporary style that recognizes the economics of social relations, the socialist potential of these relations, and the manner in which capitalism obscures this potential from view. Cues from orthodox socialist realism and contemporary relational aesthetics are merged, perhaps contentiously, to offer an ideological art strategy for the 21st century. The resulting three-part series of ambitious works engages workers from across the world in an incriminating critique of globalized capitalism and the uncertain role of contemporary art within it.

Event

Biographies:

Kerry Guinan is a visual artist and researcher based in Limerick and Dublin. Her site-specific interventions critique the interplay of art, place, and capital under neoliberalism. Guinan is a 2018/19 recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Next Generation Award and is also currently supported by Fingal County Council. Recent projects include The Limerick Soviet Shilling Project (2019), a public intervention curated by Ciaran Nash, STALKER (2019), an international retreat with Franko B and a/political, and Presenting the Cultural Quarter (2017), a residency, intervention and exhibition with A4 Sounds, Dublin. Kerry Guinan is the curator of this year’s TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: TACTICAL MAGIC, in Galway. http://kerryguinan.art/

Ann Ryan is a socially-engaged artist and recent graduate of MA in Social Practice and Creative Environment at the Limerick School of Art and Design, 2018. She has been an activist for over 25 years working on a variety of political and social justice campaigns. Her recent project Continue in Their Refusal involves a long term collaborative project with the Limerick Youth Service to re-imagine The Limerick Soviet for its centenary year in 2019. 

Dr. Kieran Cashell lectures in Critical and Contextual Studies at Limerick School of Art and Design (LIT) and is author of Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (IB Tauris, 2009). He is currently completing a monograph on Richard Billingham.

Artist-Initiated Projects at Pallas Projects/Studios is an open-submission, annual gallery programme of 10 x 3-week exhibitions taking place between March and November 2019, in the context of a gallery space with a dedicated tradition towards the professional development of artists in a peer-led, supportive environment. 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.

Artist-Initiated Projects aims to act as an incubator for early careers, and support artists' practices at crucial stages, providing a platform for artists to produce and exhibit challenging work across all art forms. The model of short-run exhibitions with a relatively short turnaround time of 3–6 months is an alternative to the normal institutional model, where the process of studio visit to exhibition can take several years. Shorter lead-in times allow the programme to be quick and responsive, reflect what artists are currently making, and encourage experimentation and risk-taking.