2019 01 January/February | The VAN & miniVAN

The miniVAN

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January/February Issue – Out Now!

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The January – February 2019 issue of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet is out now. This issue features a range of conferences, exhibitions, residencies and events that took place towards the end of 2018, while also profiling several ongoing artistic projects and collaborations. In columns for this issue, Miriam Logan outlines some philosophical perspectives on activating creativity and Róisín Kennedy reviews the recently published collection of Brian O’Doherty’s letters, edited by Brenda Moore-McCann. Maeve Mulrennan discusses the recent ‘Reframing the ‘90s’ conference in UCC and Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, while Diana Bamimeke reports on ‘Winter Seminar: The Lives of Artists’ at TBG+S and the RHA. In this issue’s regional column,…

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Synontic State

ÁINE PHILLIPS REFLECTS ON TULCA FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ARTS 2018, CURATED BY LINDA SHEVLIN. A person in complete accord with their environment is described as being in a ‘syntonic state’. Curated by Linda Shevlin, this year’s edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts in Galway examined this concept. The artists, thinkers and writers assembled by Shevlin offered different perspectives on this theme, generating various possibilities for viewers to attain syntonic experiences through art. A vibrant example of human and environmental accord was created on the opening night by Aoibheann Greenan with The Life of Riley. Taking the form of a street procession, led by a lone piper, the work involved…

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Dream Analysis

PÁDRAIC E. MOORE INTERVIEWS IRISH ARTIST DOIREANN O’MALLEY ABOUT HER RECENT SOLO EXHIBITION AT DUBLIN CITY GALLERY THE HUGH LANE. Pádraic E. Moore: Before we discuss your recent work, perhaps you can offer some insights into your background? Doireann O’Malley: I was born in Limerick and lived there until the age of nine, returning in 1999 to study Sculpture and Combined Media at Limerick School of Art & Design. Gerard Byrne, who has been a formative influence on my practice, was teaching there at the time. After this, I completed an MA at the Belfast School of Art, studying under Willie Doherty. At the time, I was working mainly in…

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Productive Friction

KEVIN BURNS REVIEWS THE FOURTH AND FINAL INSTALMENT OF VAI’S NEW SPACES EXHIBITION PROGRAMME IN DERRY. It’s about four in the afternoon: I’ve just bothered someone in an office to buzz me up to the first floor; I ascend a grand Georgian staircase, lined with Rothko posters; I wait while they switch everything on; and now I’m watching a stage eat itself. There are four metal scaffolds with stage lighting, mirrored in quadrants, cyclically contracting then expanding, like industrial foliate. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that a progress bar has appeared at the top of the screen, with a timer counting 3, 4, 5 – then…

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Good Listeners

CHRISTOPHER STEENSON INTERVIEWS DANNY MCCARTHY AND MICK O’SHEA ABOUT THEIR SERIES OF NEW RELEASES, WHICH EMERGED OUT OF THEIR PARTICIPATION IN THE ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG RESIDENCY. Christopher Steenson: How did you both come to be invited to participate in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island in Florida? Danny McCarthy: An American artist, who was sitting on the selection panel for the Rauschenberg Residency, recommended us. You cannot apply to go on the residency, as it’s by invitation only. I knew we were to be invited on an American residency, but when this arrived in my inbox it was like winning the Lotto – the terms were so generous. In fact,…

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‘MANMADE’

Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown2 November 2018 – 23 January 2019 The current exhibition, ‘MANMADE’, at Millennium Court Arts Centre, features the work of several artists examining marine debris, coral life and metaphors of irrevocable danger carried by the sea, based on increasing levels of human pollution that threaten the oceanic ecosystem. The centre has developed an accompanying public programme, comprising a range of outreach activities, aimed at promoting environmental consciousness. This agenda acts to both serve and subvert the curatorial theme: collectively the artworks explore this subject and its associated materials, yet the conceptual integrity of the exhibition is undermined, in its framing as some sort of awareness campaign.…

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‘Infrastructures of Now’

NCAD Gallery, Dublin21 September – 30 November 2018 The glass modernist façade of the NCAD Gallery may be considered a portal into the machine itself. To function, this machine depends on an engaged, creative, intellectual exchange between students, researchers, lecturers and artists, who are in turn inherently dependent on the infrastructures and resources the machine affords them. ‘Infrastructures of Now’, curated by Anne Kelly, interrogates this interdependency, critically addressing questions of autonomy, institutional expectations and the technical methodologies and languages engaged by the contemporary practitioners it frames. The works featured in this exhibition have at some point – either notionally or physically – passed through the engine rooms of this…

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Tomas Penc ‘ENDUSER’

Triskel Christchurch, Cork 11 October – 22 December 2018 In large black type, the word “ENDUSER” confronts visitors, while underneath, an inscrutable text begins: “you owe me, big smooth eggs of divine fertility laid out of the window into the endless landscape.” The phrase “you owe me” is repeated throughout this text: “you owe me…snow… strawberries…colour…”. Some, but not all, of the things ‘owed’ also appear in the presented artworks. Penc presented two distinct and consecutive phases of this exhibition, each running for approximately a month at Triskel Christchurch – an eighteenth-century neoclassical Georgian church, which functions as Triskel Art Centre’s main auditorium. The titular artwork, ENDUSER, featured in both iterations,…

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Chris Doris ‘The Empty Field’

The Model, Sligo17 November 2018 – 27 January 2019 This extensive exhibition by Chris Doris is installed across five gallery spaces at the Model, exploring a number of thematic strands, influenced by components of the artist’s life, namely: meditation, psychotherapy, psychology and neurobiology. Doris brings these professional interests into play and reinterprets them in the gallery context, showcasing a unique range of observational modes, as well as a lucid, coherent range of artworks. What might initially appear as hard-edged abstraction within the galleries, is softened through the introduction of the outside world. Natural light is present in three of the five spaces; it appears to have been deliberately choreographed to…

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Maud Cotter ‘a consequence of – without stilling’

Limerick City Gallery of Art 30 September 2018 – 6 January 2019 The fundamental experience generated by Maud Cotter’s solo exhibition, ‘a consequence of – without stilling’, at Limerick City Gallery of Art (LCGA) is appropriately described in the exhibition text as “a mercurial landscape of the mind… a place where matter and consciousness mix”. Cotter, who was one of the founders of the National Sculpture Factory, Cork, displays an uncanny understanding of, and meticulous control over, the materials she uses, as dramatically evident in two large-scale sculptures: without stilling (2017–18), a skilfully imagined construction, produced entirely of finely cut Finnish birch ply in the South Gallery; and matter of fact…

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