Susan Connolly: Traces of an Activity

Friday 8 September – Sunday 1 October 2017
Susan Connolly: Traces of an Activity | Friday 8 September – Sunday 1 October 2017 | Royal Hibernian Academy

The area of investigation within Connolly’s practice explores the ‘extendable paint surface’ and the provisionality this causes within traditional theories of medium and specificity city. By asking such questions of painting the artists concern lies in creating a space for conversation within the possibilities of the medium, rather than a model or originality for producing painted objects anew.

Absent-ness and object-ness become reoccurring themes within the body of work. Most of Connolly’s recent research is looking at spillage causing surface tension and doubt, and exploring and making visible the areas on the work when a painting can no longer be called a painting. Connolly questions what if painting becomes not quite a painting but also not identifiable as something else either.

This exhibition has taken three key questions as its starting point. A majority of the work on display was produced earlier this year during Connolly’s residency at the Golden Foundation in Upstate New York.

The first question concerns ownership, authorship and archiving in the use of other artist’s palettes. This series literally takes the residue, the over- looked and disregarded decision making and labour made by others (a form of a ready-made) to create paint skins, which reproduce ‘traces of an (their) activity’, paintings both with and without the artist hand (but whose?).

The second question concerns the concept of how materials can ‘make themselves’ through handling and process. How a wet, messy medium like paint once dry can be carefully cut and removed from its structural support to reveal residues of its own activity or chemical fusion. The absence of the paint skin in this work now makes visible the site of such an alchemical transformation. There is a level of fugitivity within the materials that is both embraced as a failure but also as a methodology of chance, making an image beyond picturing something, an image in and of its material – paint.

The third question, and one Connolly has been pre- occupied with for some time, literally moves painting beyond the wall and into the sculptural domains of floors and ceilings. Here painting monumentally holds and occupies space, inviting the viewer to both see and experience painting beyond itself, through its ‘frame/ing’ and methods of display. This work demands and seeks of its audience to view the work through movement towards, within, into and around the object of painting. Seeing becomes more then purely a ‘retinal experience’.

Susan Connolly is a graduate of Limerick School of Art and Design and holds an MFA from the University of Ulster, a first class honours MA from ACW, NCAD, Dublin and is currently a PhD candidate at Ulster University having been awarded the VC Scholarship.

Recent exhibitions include solo shows at The Lab, Dublin, 2015, dlrLexicon, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, 2015 and The Sunken Gallery, The MAC, Belfast, 2014. Group exhibitions include Peripheries 2017, Gorey School of Art, 2017, Veins, The Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, 2016, What Is, and What Might be, Highlanes Gallery, Drogehda, 2015, ArtBox, Dublin, 2014, The Trouble with Painting, The Pumphouse Gallery, London, 2014, Essays for the House of Memory, Ormston House, 2013, Limerick, Three Degrees of Painting, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, 2013. Recent awards include; The Golden Foundation, New York, 2017, Arts Funding, Kildare County Council, 2017, WARP artist residency, Belgium, 2010, Travel and Training Award, 2009, DCR Guesthouse Residency, Den Haag, Holland, 2009.

Upcoming Exhibitions include a Solo Exhibition at Platform Arts, Belfast, 2018 and participation in group exhibitions in Glasgow, Belfast and New York.

www.susanconnolly.com

Friday 8 September – Sunday 1 October 2017
Royal Hibernian Academy
15 Ely Place, Dublin 2
Telephone: +353 1 661 2558
info@rhagallery.ie
www.royalhibernianacade...
Opening hours / start times:
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Tuesday 11:00 - 17:00
Wednesday 11:00 - 19:00
Thursday 11:00 - 19:00
Friday 11:00 - 19:00
Saturday 11:00 - 19:00
Sunday 14:00 - 17:00
Admission / price: Free

 
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