The Complex presents an exhibition of new works by Louisa Casas, Isabel English, Jan McCullough & Niamh O’Malley
in association with the Irish Tour of Ireland at Venice 2022
Curated by Mark O’Gorman and Niamh O’Malley
Exhibition Run: 25 March - 07 April
Preview 24 March 6pm - 8pm
Gallery Opening Hours: Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm, Saturday 12pm - 5pm
The Complex presents ‘Fly Floor’ a group exhibition of artworks gathered together in the very particular architecture of The Gallery by Mark O’Gorman and Niamh O’Malley. The artists are Louisa Casas, Isabel English, Jan McCullough & Niamh O’Malley. Sitting between abstraction and representation these artists confront the dynamism of artworks as both self-contained and utterly contextual. This is an exhibition of deliberate positioning, solid marks and objects, shifting viewpoints and slippery narratives.
“When thinking about this exhibition in its early stages, I realised I had an opportunity to explore a curiosity to co-curate a site-specific exhibition with a visual artist. Niamh O'Malley's practice has a heightened awareness which foregrounds elements that are essential to curating such as layering, texture, placement, scale and structure. Grouping artists together has become an intrinsic part of how I conceive exhibitions in The Complex Gallery and I wanted to open this methodology up to Niamh and test how the collaboration influences the outcome." - Mark O’Gorman.
‘Fly Floor’ is an exhibition associated with the Irish Tour of Ireland at Venice 2022, presented throughout Spring 2023. It overlaps with O’Malley’s solo exhibitions in The Model (Sligo) and Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (Dublin), making possible a flow of audiences between venues, echoing a biennale-like transit.
Louisa Casas is a painter whose work plays within the traditional media of oil painting to explore boundaries of matter, mutation and synthesis. Conversations of edges and side to side energies explore possibilities for flexibility and divergence. MFA NCAD (2017), Listed Visual Arts Award (2017). Group shows include Excess Baggage, Artists in Arches (2016), Glasgow, PeripheriesOpen, Gorey School of Art (2017), Heavy Weather , The Complex (2018) , Matter has no Destiny, Pallas Projects (2018), and Bunker, The Complex (2019).
Isabel English is a visual artist based in Dublin. Through the combined mediums of photography, installation, sound, text, and sculpture, she endeavours to uncover ambiguities surrounding human experience; those that have to do with the fallibility of memory - like certain untruths and remembrances located in the past - juxtaposed with the images and narratives of the imagination. Having recently completed her MFA at the National College of Art and Design, English has gone on to curate and produce the event Sonic Displacements with Project Arts Centre (2022), and worked with artists Leda Scully and Charlotte Foley on the artist-initiated exhibition Caesura (2022) at Unit 44, Stoneybatter.
Jan McCullough is interested in the human acts of construction, fabrication and DIY, and the communities of interest and place that form around them. She employs the materials, and formal, visual languages associated with these activities to create sculptural installations, interventions and photographs.
She was recently Artist in Residence at IMMA, Dublin and at Lightwork in Syracuse, New York (2020-2021) and participated in the Freelands Artist Programme at PS² (2018-2020). Her work has been nominated for Pla(t)form at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2018); The Deutsche Borse Photography Prize (2016); The International Centre for Photography New York Infinity Award (2016); and won the British Journal of Photography Breakthrough Award (2016). Her book ‘Home Instruction Manual’, published by Verlag Kettler, was awarded the Kassel Fotobookfestival Dummy Award and shortlisted for the Recontres D’Arles Author Book Award (2016).
Niamh O’Malley’s artwork “reveals a profound appreciation for the act of trying. Trying to catch a certain slant of light, trying to prove a pattern or uncover a composition, trying to fathom a mountain, trying to hold time still. Working with the moving image, mark making and sculptural materials such as glass and wood, O’Malley’s work attempts to contain and reflect the weight and wonder of the world in its becoming. It is the act of trying, in the face of predictable failure, that gives way to conviction and a sense of hope within the artist’s work. Full of reflection, both literal and metaphorical, filled with absence and framed by negative space, O’Malley’s work asserts something unstoppable about the human spirit, something that neither distance nor death can extinguish”.Exhibition text by Kate Strain, Grazer Kunstverein, 2018.
Image courtesy Jan McCullough.
Proudly supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin City Council, and Ireland at Venice 2022.
For further info and images: contact Mark O’Gorman, Head of Exhibitions.
mark.ogorman@thecomplex.ie / 085 1433 858