Opening Reception Thursday 15 January, 6 – 8pm

The RHA are pleased to be hosting a new quiet by Dublin based artist, Mark Garry. This is the fifth major solo exhibition Garry has undertaken over the past twelve months. Garry creates beautifully considered ephemeral works that act as embodiment’s of slow time. His works are measured and quiet, often requiring meticulous systems of construction. They combine physical, visual, sensory and empathetic analogues, creating arrangements of elements that intersect spaces. This exhibition of new works incorporates a diverse range of related materials that combine to form carefully structured poetic narratives between images, material and objects.

Garry’s work stems from a fundamental interest in observing how humans navigate the world and the subjectivity inherent in these navigations. While Garry uses a variety of media and mechanisms in his practice he primarily focuses on institution-based installations. These delicately considered site-specific installations are measured and quiet, requiring meticulous systems of construction. They combine physical, visual, sensory and empathetic analogues, creating arrangements of elements that intersect the space and form relationships between a given room and each other.

These installations incorporate a specific range of natural and craft materials and processes such as plants, thread, beads, woodcarvings and manufactured materials such as colored contact, origami, and mechanical musical mechanisms. Spectrums of coloured threads are in many cases the central element of these installations. This practice is a generative process and involves the stretching and consolidating of the physical capabilities of the materials he work’s with, both as individual entities and when combined with other materials and objects. Through his intervention one’s perception of these materials is altered fundamentally from their utilitarian origins.

Mark Garry is an artist, curator, writer, educator and occasional musician and studied Fine Art and Design, Interactive Media and a Masters in Visual arts practices at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Garry has held exhibitions at prestigious art venues in Europe and North America. While he uses a variety of media and mechanisms in his practice, including drawing, filmmaking, writing papers, Garry primarily focuses on collaborative music projects and the making of site-specific gallery based installations.

Garry represented Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale in a group exhibition and Ireland at Venice 2005, which was subsequently presented at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, in 2006. Recent selected solo exhibitions include: RHA Dublin, 2015, The Model and Niland collection, 2014, Kerlin gallery Dublin, 2014 Lafayette projects Marseille, France, 2014, City gallery, Charleston South Carolina, USA.

Garry has independently curated exhibitions at The Project Arts Centre, RHA, The Dock, and Draiocht Arts Centre. He has curated a visual arts program for the Dublin Fringe Festival from 2000 – 2004, worked for The Mattress Factory Art Museum in Pittsburgh PA, USA from 2009 – 2010 and has intermittently programed exhibitions for the Goethe Institute, Dublin from 2008 -2013. Garry has lectured in fine art at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) for the past eight years and is represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.