The LAB Gallery is pleased to present em-bracing a group exhibition featuring Kate Fahey, Adam Gibney and Jonathan Mayhew curated by Séamus McCormack.

Through a range of approaches, positions and media, including sculpture, moving image, installation and scent, em-bracing explores the virtual selves’ relationship to physical selves by questioning how constantly evolving technologies can (trans) form identity and perception.

Through the prism of both IRL and URL realities, the works in this exhibition refract and reflect on the complexity of these interconnected experiences. As we emerge from the COVID-19 global pandemic, we have generated a more complex understanding of corporeality in relation to how technology permeates our bodies. We have increasingly recognised ourselves as porous and vulnerable bodies entwined with connections and experiences mediated by non-human or haptic forms of communication.
em-bracing investigates how digital technologies can complicate connectivity and detachment, embodiment and disembodiment, and intimacy and distance – thus creating profound effects on the identification of others and of our self.

The exhibition is complemented by a newly developed online resource at www.em-bracing.com. This includes new digital works by the three artists, which act as footnotes to the exhibited works in the gallery; a text by the curator Séamus McCormack; and a response by Pita Arreola Burns (Digital Art Curator V&A London and Co-founder off Site Project).

The curator and artists will also participate in an online panel discussion to expand on their research and the works included in em-bracing. In partnership with The School of Creative Arts, TU Dublin, and as an extension to their exhibited works, Fahey, Gibney and Mayhew will lead practical and discursive artist-led workshops. More information on all of these events will be announced here soon and on the online resource.

Kate Fahey is an artist based between Kilkenny and London working with print, sculpture, moving image and installation. She received an MA in Fine Art Print at the Royal College of Art, London in 2015 and in 2020 she completed a practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London. Recent exhibitions include Living Balance at The Library Project (2022), blubbing, (solo) at Commonage London, (2021) Woman in the Machine, Visual Carlow (2021) and Gut Feeling, Arti et Amiticiae, Amsterdam (2021). In 2021/22 she was the recipient of the New Contemporaries and SPACE Studios Bursary. She has completed residencies including ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin (2019); Leitrim Sculpture Centre (2018); British School at Rome (2017) and Callan Workhouse Union, Kilkenny (2016). Upcoming exhibitions include Present Imperfect (solo) Pallas Projects, Dublin (2022).

Adam Gibney is a Dublin based artist who graduated from IADT, Dun Laoghaire. His solo exhibitions include Projective Verse 9: Deep Breadths (Daegu Foundation of Culture, South Korea, 2017) and Euclid, I miss you…(Artbox, Dublin, 2016). Other notable exhibitions include Scaffold (The Bomb Factory, London, 2019), The Voyage (CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles, 2016) and Futures (Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 2014). In 2016, Adam represented Ireland in the V Moscow Biennale for Young Art – Deep Inside.In 2019, Adam launched his first public art project, Your Seedling Language, in St. Catherine’s School, Rush, Co. Dublin. In 2021 he exhibited his solo-show Can you breathe for me? at the Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin and completed a temporary public art commission for Graft as commissioned by The Glucksman Gallery and The National Sculpture Factory, Cork. Adam is currently working on a public art commission for Fingal County Council’s Infrastructure programme. He is also undertaking a practice-based research masters funded by the Technological University of Dublin.

Jonathan Mayhew (b.1981) is an Irish artist based in Dublin. Recent Exhibitions include: Zurich Portrait Prize 2021, National Galley of Ireland & Crawford Art Gallery, Artworks 2020 Visual Carlow; Agnes and I, Library Project 2019; The wind steals music brings it to me, Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2019; Scaffold, Bomb Factory London, 2019; digital_self, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2018; Sørlandsutstillingen, Kristiansand Kunsthall, Norway, 2017; I Wanted to Write a Poem, Wexford Arts Centre, 2017. His works are in the collections of the Art Council of Ireland and the Office of Public Works, along with various private collections. He was the TBG&S/HIAP international residency exchange awardee 2019. He is kindly supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Séamus McCormack has curated exhibitions at Luan Gallery; ArtBox; Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Bomb Factory; Lewisham Arthouse & upcoming at Lismore Castle Arts. He runs Commonage project space, is Programme Curator, New Contemporaries and was previously Assistant Curator at Whitechapel Gallery & the Irish Museum of Modern Art working on exhibitions Electronic Superhighway; Intellectual Barbarians: Kibbo Kift Kindred; Primal Architecture; Traces and with Christopher Williams, Willie Doherty, Haroon Mirza, Harun Farocki & Alice Maher. He has programmed symposia ‘Archives & Identities’, ‘Sounding out Practice’, ‘Writing into Practice’ & ‘Craft-tech’. Delivering talks & workshops at the RHA; South London Gallery & Leeds Art Gallery, he has been a visiting tutor at Slade, City & Guilds London, Oxford Brookes University, Glasgow School of Art & Leeds Beckett University.