Opening Reception Friday 6 January, 4 – 7pm • Artist’s talk Saturday 7 January at 2pm

We spend much of our daily lives caught up in busy routines, unobservant of the curious details that make up the visual world we are passing through. Irish artist Miriam O’Connor’s photographic series Attention Seekers lingers on these often overlooked traces, singling them out with an attentive and subtle gaze that imbues them with a mysterious and magical vitality. Attention Seekers is concerned with the representation of everyday scenes, spaces and people encountered by the photographer, and O’Connor has a unique talent for discovering infinite possibilities of image-making amidst the quotidian banality, slicing out those details which petition for attention.

The subjects of these images are conceived of as possessing an ambiguous agency of their own, discharging a kind of magnetism that it is impossible for the photographer to ignore. They solicit attention – that of the photographer and, ultimately, of the viewer – with their strangely insistent and often subtly unsettling juxtapositions, shapes and colours. Modest or minute elements recur as motifs across the series, where, time, location and horizons are regularly obscured, appearing outwardly irrelevant. The photographer does not venture forth into the world with the intent of taming it with her camera, but instead responds to the demands that the everyday environment – in all its uncertainty, obscurity, ridiculousness and strange beauty – presses upon her. Full of ambiguous clues and mischievous suggestions, the images represent, above all, a deep curiosity around looking and seeing, and a preoccupation with the impression that these scenes in some way return the gaze. Attention Seekers depicts these subjects with an almost claustrophobic intimacy that leaves the viewer with an intense feeling of being a special guest in O’Connor’s universe.

Miriam O’Connor (IRL) was born in County Cork, Ireland, and currently lives and works in Dublin. She holds a BA in photography from the Dublin Institute of Technology and has recently completed a Research Masters at the Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin. In addition to her artistic practice, she is also an educator, teaching courses on practical and creative approaches to photography.

For more information see www.miriamoconnor.com

In connection with the exhibition, Galleri Image will produce a catalogue published by PogoBooks in collaboration with the artist.

More information: www.pogobooks.de