Curated by Alissa Kleist on behalf of Black Church Print Studio

Exhibiting Artists: Chloe Brenan, Patrick Hough, Ermias Kifleyesus, Ciara Phillips, Lee Welch

Associated Events

Alissa Kleist: Curator Talk
Friday 7 September 2018, 1.15pm at The Library Project

Culture Night
Friday 21 Sept 2018, exhibition open until 9.00pm

The medium is the message is a group exhibition including new and existing works by Ireland and UK-based and international artists Chloe Brenan, Patrick Hough, Ermias Kilfreysius, Ciara Phillips and Lee Welch, curated by Alissa Kleist.

The exhibition takes its title and some of its thematic references from a book (The Medium is the Massage) and a chapter in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, a seminal text in media studies by Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan proposes that how we send and receive messages is no less important than the message itself and that technologies have the capacity to alter the world around them.

Published over 50 years ago, McLuhan’s pioneering texts remain relevant today and are particularly pertinent in the context of Black Church Print Studio, an organisation that focuses on the development and promotion of tactile, manual processes in the centre of a city that  – like much of our global society – is increasingly shaped by disembodied digital technologies and intangible service-based industries.

The creation of physical objects using mechanical processes that have existed for hundreds of years is a testament to the enduring power of print as a medium. Organisations like Black Church Print Studio not only support artists to produce images but also generate communities of interest and place. The medium is the message acknowledges a medium’s ability to affect its environment and considers the role of matter in an increasingly immaterial world. The works in The medium is the message in different ways represent the agency of material and its ability to generate connections and reflect on, as well as produce, societal change. Included in the exhibition are works where cinema, technology and museology converge (Patrick Hough) and images that explore printmaking and its possibilities (Ciara Phillips) and act as potential sites for collective creation and exchange (Ermias Kifleyesus). Responses to the exhibition’s themes include new painting guided by the symbolic order of tarot (Lee Welch) and silver gelatin prints and a limited edition newsprint (Chloe Brenan) examining how matter forms meaning.

Project funded by Dublin City Council.

For further information, please contact: Hazel Burke – info@blackchurchprint.ie | +353 1 6773629