FAR FROM HERE

CURATED BY MARK O’GORMAN AND PAUL MCGRANE

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An out-of-place artifact (OOPArt) is an artifact of historical, archaeological, or \

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Pádraig Spillane’s photographic collages and assembled sculptures use familiar images of the human body. However, his use of collage and editing techniques create imagery which becomes fluid and, at times, alien.  In the work presented in this exhibition, titled ‘Paradise Transmission’, rippled water assumes the qualities of mercury, a figure inhabits an undetermined space, and the body itself glows as in an unfinished state. The resulting scene seems to have been shot in an inverted alternate reality.

Barbara Knezevic uses selections of handmade and found objects to form intentionally staged groupings, familiar in relation to film and theatre sets, photographic shoots and so on. Through the use of gestural forms and colour in her handmade ceramics and moving image, these assemblages enter the realm of the unfamiliar.

For this exhibition we aim to use the gallery space as a stage for the artworks to perform as relics collected from unspecified eras of time and origin. Each piece performs the role of creating a fictitious reality, where these objects have been collected, presented and archived, with a multiplicity of potential narratives as to why these works exist in such a space together. This is done in an attempt to focus on the objects in and of themselves rather than their contemporary and historical contexts, and their makers.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

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Robert Dunne finds material and ideas for his work in everyday situations. The visual and physical memory of his environment affects everything he makes. ‘I look at things around me and think about functionality, design, material and scale, and how time and need have shaped these things’. His process of making is a kind of reimagining or juxtaposition of things he has seen or experienced, half familiar but new at the same time. It is this very real hands-on experience which informs the physical parameters of the work.

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The work plays with familiar material, creating connections with and deriving meaning from their traditional usage, making the objects at times seem quite familiar. As well as bringing form to the pieces the plaster hides and exposes elements of the structural fabric of the work. The scraps of wood used were once part of something larger and would have had a function or use. Once assembled within this new context they exhibit residual traces of their former use.

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Barbara Knezevic’s work is primarily object based, finding form as complex stagings and formations of objects that are occasionally foregrounded by photographic works and moving images.  These formations are omnivorous selections of things that act together to call to mind other familiar stagings of objects in the world - such as film sets, photographic shoots, museum displays and retail displays.  In these artwork formations, items are arranged with attention to, though not always respecting museological conventions that make visible the hierarchies of value in material culture.

Her practice concerns itself with the volatile material and interpretive relationships involved in art-making, the language and nature of materials, the codes of display and exhibition, and the ways in which artworks are represented, archived, stored, traded and discussed. Her artworks and formations describe the peculiar human relationship to the things around us that is often typified by our relationship to the art-object; our treatment of matter or ‘things’ as agents, commodities, tools, proxies, artefacts, aloof matter and models for representation.

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Pádraig Spillane works with photography, appropriation and object-based assemblages. Through these various means he explores intersections of desire through imagery, anthropomorphic arrangements, and installation. His employment of materials considers gestural potentials and animations of various forms with works performing as gatherings of disruption and appeal.