Exiles
Opening Reception Thursday 14 March 6 – 8pm
Rhona Byrne / Mark Garry / James Hanley / Stephen Loughman / Ronan McCrea / Ruby Wallis • curated by Alison Pilkington
As part of the Five Lamps Arts Festival theme commemorating the centenary of the Dublin Lockout of 1913 artist Alison Pilkington has brought together a diverse group of artists to consider the idea of being ‘locked out’ as a metaphor for the human condition.
The title of the show, ‘Exiles’, alludes to a form of self imposed ‘lock out’, but also refers to a state of existence apart from one’s home or perhaps, oneself. Another curatorial inspiration for the exhibition was the words of the poet Arthur Rimbaud. In 1871, the then seventeen year old Rimbaud wrote, “I is another”, acknowledging the collective human experience whilst referring to the self as a position outside the individual. The artists involved have produced a rich variety of work that responds to the idea of being locked out of society, of the self or in more esoteric ways, existence itself.
Rhona Byrne’s audio piece explores changing perceptions of self, body and personal experience in relation to space. By listing object or situational phobias, the work addresses the complexities and subjectivity of our spatial lives and how anxiety and fear can alter perceptions of place.
Mark Garry’s practice blends a variety of formats such as the sonic and the tactile with the visual. His video piece is part of an ongoing project that deals with the physiological, psychological and social realities of being a blind person in contemporary Ireland and subtly explores the predominance of visual linguistics in the world.
James Hanley is a well regarded portrait painter and for this exhibition is presenting painting and drawing depicting some of the Communist era statues exiled to a snow-covered statue park on the outskirts of Budapest. Marx, Engels, Lenin, famous personalities, heroes and soldiers of the Red Army in monumental form are now banished to the suburbs. There, their physical glories remain but their former individual and very public impact has been changed.
Stephen Loughman has produced a miniature diorama for the exhibition, a fictional scene from the Hermitage Museum in which a figure looks at a painting, the piece addresses the activity of looking and prompts a self conscious, existential awareness of it.
An iconic photograph of the Dublin Lock out forms the Basis of Ronan McCrea’s piece. The work consists of a sequence of projected 35mm slides showing detailed enlargements of the photograph at times to the point of abstraction or obliteration. The sequence of images accompanied by an oblique narrative subtly alludes to media consumption of the image and of the history of the event, tracked and contained through photographic images.
Ruby Wallis’ work is a personal ethnography of growing up in Coolorta, a community in the Burren Co Clare. The unfixability of meaning and the impossibility of representation are at the heart of her practice, which takes the form of a series of experimental and philosophical attempts to represent place through film photography, sound and text.
The Five Lamps festival will run from 9th to 25th April in various venues in the Dublin 1 area.
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