Opening Reception Thursday 17 July at 6pm

Limerick City Gallery of Art proudly presents PROTOTYPES, Dennis McNulty’s first solo exhibition at a public institution in Ireland, curated by Mary Conlon. Housed in the Carnegie Building, the gallery is composed of a series of relatively recent extensions arranged around a century-old central core, former site of the Free Library and Museum. The starting point for the exhibition is the building itself as found object. McNulty inserts new and existing works into the historical and spatial narratives of the building, material and immaterial interventions which hint at structural instabilities in the relationships between language, space and technology. In the recent extensions to the building – or at their thresholds, McNulty creates gateways or portals, resulting in a series of interstitial spaces which play host to a body of work assembled from technological artefacts, construction materials, abject electronics, song lyrics and algorithms. Potential settings or scenarios are proposed: a future archivist recalls her encounters with telepathic operating systems and memory compositing software; primitive machines grapple with language, their lopsided Turing Tests hinting at sentience; and dark folded objects envelop missing books on the digital technologies that first caused them to dematerialise and may now render them obsolete.

In the original extension to the Free Library and Museum, built as a municipal gallery to exhibit the city’s Permanent Collection, a selection from the collection is made through the application of a simple linguistic rule. The method echoes the predictions of Italian writer, Italo Calvino, in his seminal lecture Cybernetics and Ghosts (November 1967), on the future automation of image and text: “the machine used in these experiments is an instrument of chance, of the destructuralization of form, of protest against every habitual logical connection.” The resulting selection of over one hundred works, Untitled or with no title, hangs in the space like the outcome of a search query.

Dennis McNulty (b. 1970, Ireland) is an artist whose work is generated through an investigation of embodied knowledge in relation to other forms of knowledge, often in the context of the built environment. Beginning with detailed research of various kinds, and informed by his studies in engineering and psychoacoustics, the works often take hybrid forms, drawing on aspects of cinema, sculpture, sound and performance.

Recent solo projects include The Face of Something New, Scriptings, Berlin (2013); A Stew of Universals, ZKU – Zentrum fur Kunst and Urbanistik, Berlin (2013); INTERZONE, Seamus Ennis Centre, Naul, Fingal, Co.Dublin (2012); Precast, Robin Hood Gardens and Preston’s Road roundabout, Blackwall, East London (2012); Some feeling of living in today. Jerusalem Project (2012); Another Construction, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2011); Space Replaced by Volume, the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Arts, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (2011); and The Driver and the Passenger, Green On Red, Dublin (2010).

Group shows include, False Optimism, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2013); De L’Emergence du Phenix, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (2012); Vexed Endings, Green on Red, Dublin (2012); All Humans Do, White Box, New York (2012); Harboring Tone and Place, CCS Bard Gallery, Bard College, (2011); Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven, Bureau for Open Culture, CCAD, Columbus, Ohio & Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont (2011); Mixtapes; Popular Music in Contemporary Art, The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2010); Nothing is Impossible, The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2010); and São Paulo Bienal (2004 & 2008).

Prototypes is curated by Mary Conlon and is generously supported through an Arts Council of Ireland Project Award. Thanks to Helen Carey, Dr. Kieran Cashell, Sheila Deegan, Tracy Fahey, Mike Fitzpatrick, Paul Foley, Siobhán O’Reilly and Maeve Connolly.