An Exhibition of new work by Artists L9 Collective • Studio 6, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

In her short story, The Midnight Zone, writer Lauren Groff expands on the correlations between the darkest band of sea life and our most vulnerable human states. Here, the narrator, with a head injury, is speaking with her young sons:

They told me about the sunlight, the twilight and the midnight zones – the three depths of water, where there is transparent light, then a murky, darkish light, then no light at all … (And there is) a tornado of air which stretches from the midnight zone, where the fish are blind, all the way up to the birds.

For this exhibition, Beneath the Surface, there is a collective dipping into the deepest undercurrents by all five artists – David Glassey, Linda Hederman, Jennifer Hennessy, Daniela Monza and Sinead O’Connor. Although Hennessy is the only artist in the group who directly utilizes underwater imagery, Monza, O’Connor, Glassey and Hederman all explore the tension between the seen and the unseen.

Monza, Hederman and Hennessy consider conscious and subliminal states – desire, identity, anxiety, muffled memory; whereas Glassey and O’Connor nod to more physically tangible processes such as man’s stamp on the landscape and the concept of marking time.

A common dialogue in the work is the bridge between a solid reckoning and human vulnerability. Through their unified explorations, these artists go beneath the surface and each shines a torch at even the most opaque places.

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