a silent year
Gareth Kennedy / Ruth Lyons / Bea McMahon / Culturstruction
The Lab, Foley Street, Dublin 1
Opening Wednesday 11th February 6 – 8 pm
Exhibition runs 12th February – 28th February 2009
Lab Opening times:
In 1927, following the collapse of his commercially unsuccessful Stockade housing company, Buckminster Fuller set out on a year of research and thinking which he later referred to as his “silent year”. The following year Fuller published the pamphlet “4D” in which he proposed that time was the fourth dimension that designers must always consider. The “silent year” proved to be pivotal in the development of Fuller’s work and the 4d theory led him to visionary projects such as the Dymaxion series and later the Geodesic Dome.
In 2009, it is estimated that one third of all housing in Ireland has been built within the last ten years. Although the majority of Irish people now live in urban areas, throughout the boom years many held onto romantic notions of owning land and dancing at the crossroads on our fair green isle.
A silent year is an exhibition of video works by three Irish artists – Gareth Kennedy, Ruth Lyons and Bea McMahon exploring ideas of freedom and constraint.
Kennedy presents two related monitor based works. Inflatable Bandstand (2008) depicts the rise and subsequent fall of an ambulant and yellow inflatable bandstand. Custom-made in 2008 to tour Leitrim and Roscommon, the bandstand was host to a specially commissioned musical piece which took the development of the Irish economy over the last ten years as its muse. For A Silent Year Kennedy presents an edit of sites the Bandstand visited, depicted depopulated, the performance over, or perhaps yet to take place. The structure auto inflates and just as it reaches an architectural scale suddenly collapses and expends itself. Accompanying this is Planning Verbatim (2008), a ticker tape of the shorthand used on the top of planning applications, some relating to the development plans for the sites visited by the Inflatable Bandstand, and others simply indicative of developments within the county which manifest a ‘rururban’ imposition on a rural landscape.
Fly Fishing (2008) is typical of the subtle and often playfully morbid humour in Ruth Lyons’ work. The video depicts a lone protagonist, standing at the top of a hill, ‘fishing’ for birds by flying baited hooks from a kite off the end of a fishing rod. This obscure reflection of reality alludes to the fairytale notion of a warped world on the other side of the looking glass. At times a thick mist eclipses the surrounding landscape and intensifies the sense of isolation as the girl, alone on the hill, battles the immediate phenomena.
Bea McMahon, an MA Graduate from IADT, will exhibit Reciprocal 0 (2007), a split-screen projection showing a hooded man dancing in a wood. The seemingly wild forest area McMahon has filmed reveals itself as the centre of a heavily trafficked roundabout in Blanchardstown. The pre-inspiration for the piece was the painting 'The isle of the dead' by Arnold Bocklin. McMahon’s background in Mathematical Physics underpins her visual arts practice which is largely concerned with the connections that ordered sequences can imply exist between random analogies.
Continuing the exploration of ideas of freedom and constraint Culturstruction will present a chronological library of data, writings, drawings, songs and poems tracing the story of how housing policy, law, greed and romantic ideas have, over time, affected the shape of the built environment in Ireland.
As we deal with budget cuts in the arts and massive jobs losses in the architecture profession how do we come to terms with the chasm between our imaginings and reality? What can we do with thousands of empty houses tacked on to the far edges of surburbia, no turf fires burning at the hearth? As the only post-colonial nation in Western Europe do we have a gripe with being told what to do? And what happens when we do as we please?
A silent year proposes we take our time in answering these questions.
A silent year is produced by Culturstruction, a collaborative practice of Jo Anne Butler and Tara Kennedy which positions itself at the intersection of art and architecture to explore ideas of cultural production within the built environment.
ARTISTS BIOGRAPHIES
Gareth Kennedy
Kennedy enjoys the challenge of making physical works which manifest a public dimension and have a complex identity as they often mix elements of contemporary art, architecture, performance and design. There is often a ‘bespoke’ or customised dimension to these experimental structures, and their sorties into a public context are often contingent on considerable negotiation with ‘non-art’ publics. Kennedy actively courts his work’s vulnerability as temporary structures trying to find a place and function within a social milieu. This is especially pertinent since his works often have a ‘functional’ element and typically attempt to operate both as artwork and everyday entity. His practice to date includes public art work, educational projects, exhibitions, residencies and collaborations. In 2009 he will co-represent Ireland along with artist Sarah Browne at the 53rd Venice Biennale.
www.after.ie
Ruth Lyons
Ruth Lyons is an artist based in Daingean, County Offaly. In 2007 Lyons graduated with a BA Hons Fine Art Sculpture from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. She has also spent time studying as an Erasmus student in the Vilnius Academy of Art, Lithuania. Her practice includes installation, video and painting, which she uses in bold and playful ways to highlight the awesome power of life. In 2007 Lyons co-founded The Good Hatchery artist space and residency programme in Daingean, County Offaly. Located in the rural context of a converted stables and former duckling hatchery, the resident artists have endeavoured to furnish and sustain an environmentally friendly working and living environment through the acquisition of a premises and its contents vis Freecycle [a web - based resource for recycling unwanted items]. She has participated in a number of residencies in Ireland including The Friary at Multyfarnham and more recently _unit project in Portlaoise. Her work has been included in group and selected events such as, And The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter (Number 7, Russell Avenue, Dublin 2008), Never Ending Telescope (Backloft Space, Dublin 2008) and Weather Permitting film screening [Mantua Arts Project, Roscommon 2008]. Lyons exhibited her first solo project titled, God Ball at Grennan Mill, Thomastown as part of the 2008 Kilkenny Arts Festival. Lyons studied architecture in UCD for one term before deflecting to Fine Art at NCAD.
www.thegoodhatchery.wordpress.com
Bea McMahon
Bea McMahon (b.Ireland 1972) received a Masters in Visual Arts Practice from Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art and Design in 2007. Prior to that, she completed a primary degree in pure mathematics at Trinity College Dublin (1994) and a Masters degree in mathematical physics at University College Dublin (1997). She was awarded a Visual Artist Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2005, 2006 and 2008. In 2007 she was awarded the Curated Visual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. She is included in the collection of the Arts Council of Ireland. McMahon mostly uses video and small drawings to articulate her ideas which weave a strange and boundless path between an inner reality of thought and the ordinary outside world, a world in which her version of events have a somewhat hallucinogenic feel. Even though her practice does not subscribe to an obvious visual lexicon of science, it does rely on thought process she learnt through the study of mathematics – one which exists in a state of logic and before language. Her work forces little gaps to open up, or makes a life moment to come apart into two distinct things, one of which gives way to the other, whilst retaining the memory of the world as it was before. In her work is a withdrawal from the search to expose underlying structure towards a position that the action of thinking and feeling is an active force generating the underlying structure.
Culturstruction
Culturstruction is a collaborative practice of Jo Anne Butler and Tara Kennedy which positions itself at the intersection of art and architecture to explore ideas of cultural production within the built environment.
Butler and Kennedy graduated from NCAD in 2005, both having obtained a first class joint honours degree in Fine Art Sculpture and History of Art and Design.
Following graduation Butler worked as Assistant Arts Projects Manager with Breaking Ground, the Ballymun Regeneration Ltd. per cent for art scheme. Projects here included Jochen Gerz’s amaptocare, Seamus Nolan’s Hotel Ballymun, Adam Chodzko’s Around. Butler also maintained her own practice, with work including co-curating Going Blind, a live art/music event at Ard Bia Art Space, Galway with artist Eilis Mc Donald and more recently exhibiting The Folly (2008) in response to Transitopia ,in Naas, Co.Kildare..
Kennedy established a practice working interactively, and often collaboratively, in a variety of public art contexts. In 2007 she worked with Studiorogers Architects for the RSUA's Two Minds residency. Hope Inherent is an ongoing collaborative project with Jennie Moran, supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council and currently participating in _unit, Portlaoise, with Laois Arts Office. Other work includes Transplant (2006), Sandymount Strand, Dublin and projects for the Dublin Fringe Festival, Kilkenny Arts Festival and Kildare County Council. Kennedy has exhibited in Ireland at Temple Bar Gallery, the RIAI, the Golden Thread Gallery, and at rm103, Auckland, New Zealand and Careof, Milan, where she was awarded the FAR Epson Award for Artistic Research in 2006.
In 2007 Kennedy and Butler began studying Architecture at UCD. This route from art, towards architecture has formed the starting point for Culturstruction, and for further exploration of how art can be the ideal forum in which to provoke much needed critical debate around architecture, the built environment, and the ways in which meaning and memory are created through buildings and public spaces.
In October 2008 Butler and Kennedy devised and produced Culturstruction 2008, a series of artworks which coincided with the Irish Architecture Foundation’s Open House weekend. Featuring four Irish artists who produced new work in response to the architecture and constructed spaces of Dublin, Culturstruction investigated ways in which the artists – Mary Jo Gilligan, Jesse Jones, Padraic Moore and Eilis McDonald - can both playfully and provocatively stimulate debate on architecture, planning and the built environment. In addition, Culturstruction Screenings was a complementary selection of recent art films with an architectural relevance shown in Meeting House Square. Culturstruction 2008 was funded by Dublin City Council’s Arts Office as part of the Open Spaces programme. The Open Spaces initiative seeks to explore the possibilities of innovative contemporary arts practice in the city’s urban and suburban open spaces.
www.culturstrction.wordpress.com
Read the exhibition talk