Dnote - Dnote is a guide to art and culture in Ireland

Cloud Illusions I Recall explores the relationship between visual art and cinema. The Irish Museum of Modern Art invited artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Cerith Wyn Evans to exhibit their work and explore concepts of the poetic and imagination that together make up the cinematic experience, thereby investigating the relationships and influence of film.

Paintings, sculpture & glass by gallery & invited artists, including John Behan RHA, Eilís O’Connell, Orla de Brí, Comhghall Casey, Kieran Crowley & Leah Beggs.

Analysing Cubism is an exhibition exploring the work of a number of pioneering Irish artists who travelled to France and further afield to study modern art. The exhibition seeks to place these artists in context, examining the influence of their teachers, as well as exploring the work of some of the leading international exponents of Cubism. The exhibition focuses on work by Albert Gleizes, Evie Hone, André Lhote and Mainie Jellett – in recognition of the extensive influence that these artists have had on modern Irish abstract painting.

The act of shaking hands is a performance. Humans alone perform this act, frequently and often on a daily basis. The context defines the intensity and weight placed upon this single gesture that joins two bodies together in a physical bond. It is a performance we enact to demonstrate genuine interest, commonality, shared integrity and is generally servant to a social occasion or contractual agreement. In ‘The Longest Handshake’ this act is isolated and performed by up to one hundred people simultaneously.

How is photography responding to the crisis? An Uncertain State looks at how photographic artists are representing this period of austerity and uncertainty in Ireland. Their work addresses important issues at the heart of where we are now: contested and hidden histories, effects of the global financial crisis, and the radically altered social and physical landscapes. The ten artists in An Uncertain State go beyond surface readings to reflect the emerging concerns in post celtic tiger Ireland: the treatment of asylum seekers; institutional abuse; sexual abuse; emigration; the legacy of the property crash; identity; disadvantage & marginalisation; and the legacy of conflict.

Opening Reception Thursday 20 June, 6 – 8pm Alan Brooks (UK), Gerard Byrne (IE), Tacita Dean (UK), Scott Myles (UK) In the selection of works of historic significance in the evolution of these artist’s practices, drawn from the last two decades, this exhibition is conceived to mediate on the meaning of intuition and hindsight. In [...]

Food for Swan brings together a series of photographs made over the past three years in and around the Bray Head Inn located on Bray’s Victorian promenade during the artist’s regular visits to Wicklow.

This symposium offers an in-depth dialogue between leading curators whose practice engages with the Internet as a site for cultural production. Drawing upon personal and practical experiences, the panellists bring together critical and creative investigations of new media and curatorial practices. The Internet represents an emerging space – the terms of which are constantly being negotiated – and in a short time has become a powerful platform for innovation, politics, economic growth and creative practice. The panellists represent a broad cross-section of curators whose distinct interests and models of practice use information technologies not only as a medium and tool, but also as an integral part of the curatorial process [1]. Speculating upon the interrelationship between online culture, digital technologies and curatorial practice, speakers will discuss how the role of curator and artist is transitioning, not only with the growth of digital technologies, but also through the offline factors that continue to affect how the Internet as a creative platform is developed.

The widening of the Panama Canal, the world’s most important cargo route, is due for completion in 2015 and the size of ships and supertankers are about to double. Five thousand miles away in Limerick, the Shannon is one of the deepest waterways in Europe, giving it a distinct advantage to be able to handle a new generation of gigantic seafaring vessels. Plans are afoot to develop new extensive port facilities. With a strategic geographical position beside the Atlantic and opportunities now afforded as China develops trade ties with Europe, an unprecedented global position is now possible for the region. Some local newspaper reports and commentary have speculated that the Shannon might eventually rival the likes of Rotterdam and Hamburg.

Opdøl’s practice includes drawing, sculpture, photography and installation. The title of the show, point of no return relates to the point in a story when the plot has developed to the stage where you can only move forward with what you have. It is a fascination with things not being reversible, such as the depletion of our earth’s natural resources, the extinction of species of animals, and the strangeness of a human race that keeps on ravaging the planet, while knowing they are the authors of their own destruction. Opdøl ‘stirs’ stories in us much more so than telling us stories, her works providing more a nudge in a direction rather than a narrative.

Angelika Wittek, Beate Gördes and Hiltrud Gauf are the featured artists. . Wittek has created ‘Shipping Traffic’, an installation of 1000 paper boats are suspended from the ceiling of CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery. Gauf work in conceptual drawing, she has two series of drawings, ‘Swimmers’, done with charcoal on paper, which abstract the form of swimmers by framing sections of their bodies. Gauf also has delicate pencil drawings of the Rhine and the Tiber. Gördes is exhibiting several video pieces as well as a sound installation made up of sounds of Cologne city, a piece developed especially for this exhibition.

Taylor Galleries is delighted to present Subtle Correspondence, an exhibition of recent paintings by Donegal artist Ann Quinn which opens at the gallery with a private view on Thursday 13 June 2013 from 6 to 8pm. The exhibition is Quinn’s first solo show with the gallery, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.

Taylor Galleries is delighted to present Landfall, an exhibition of new paintings by Dublin-based artist Louise Neiland which opens at the gallery with a private view on Thursday 13 June 2013 from 6 to 8pm. The exhibition is Neiland’s first solo show with the gallery, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.

Taylor Galleries is delighted to present Dark Palaces, an exhibition of recent work by Ruth McDonnell which opens at the gallery with a private view on Thursday 13 June 2013 from 6 to 8pm. The exhibition is McDonnell’s first solo show with the gallery, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.

“Fix on, ok, look’s outside. The tree. A tree. What kind of things, things out of a story. What lives in a tree? A bird. A bird lives in a tree, ok ok what ok what can this bird be doing, the bird eghhhh, maybe its not a bird maybe it’s a person. Maybe the person who wants to be a bird, ok and what is that person trying to do and where is it going to go. What kind of story arc is it going to be doing? Ok the start of the story, Ok it’s a boy that wants to be a bird.

In this collection of paintings I have tried to depict an instant when children are totally absorbed in the moment. These moments remind me of when I am totally absorbed in painting, they are precious moments for me, just as the moments when children are absorbed in an activity, are precious. They seem blind to the troubles of the world around them, which is often a feeling that slips away with adulthood. I hoped to catch a universality in the pieces, so that the subjects could be any boy or girl lost in the act of being a child

Since Aesop, and indeed further back into history, human values have been projected onto animals as a vehicle for exploring our relationships with one-another and the world around us. This exhibition considers some of the ways animals have been deployed symbolically within contemporary art practice.

Seven of Ireland’s leading Illustrators – chosen for innovation, wit, style, uniqueness and exceptional talent – were asked to respond to the subject of ‘extinction’, and to contextualise their submission with a viewing cabinet of influences and miscellany.

This exhibition brings together ten of the most intriguing and creative wood artists practicing today from all over the world, alongside ten of Ireland’s leading practitioners. This group of sculptors, furniture makers, carvers and turners will work together under the artistic direction of Terry Martin (AUS). Over a week-long studio-based collaborative work creative week-long process in Carlow this June, they will assemble a large-scale sculpture in the form of a wall, approximately 12 feet in length. This work will be installed in the VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art.

Artists Stephen McKenna and Amelia Stein have made this year’s selection, with selected local, national and international works sitting alongside five ‘invited’ artists – Gary Coyle, Richard Gorman, Eithne Jordan, Jim Savage and Dorothy Cross – who will each be offering a new or recent work for the show.

In many of the paintings made by Phillip Allen over the last decade, a vivid and ebullient graphic clarity contends with more convulsive painterly features. His paintings have often presented brightly coloured, interconnecting volumes or repeating, distending patterns within more mutedly toned, wide-open zones. Bordering these spaces at the upper and lower limits of the canvas, Allen’s trick has been to lay down richly abundant lines of curling impasto paint: glorious blooms and bursts of multifarious colour that thickly combine to frame and deepen the visual drama at the centre of the picture. But what we see is never quite clear, never entirely ‘contained’. The graphic elements often offer hinting suggestions of buildings or other tall structures — they sometimes resemble wonky or wildly implausible monuments — but the precarious, piled-up shapes also at times allude to letters or numbers, as if a kind of coded communication were being proposed. Invariably, Allen shows us something being assembled — there is recurrent piecing-together of basic elements — but the results depart thrillingly from rational organisation, towards a more dream-like, open-ended and associative way of imagining a world.

Surrendering ‘the self’ to the sensory elements of colour, form and sound is at the core of Aisling Conroy’s work. Her work is multi-disciplinary using painting, sculpture, sound, and installation and attempts to emulate the notion of ‘the sublime’ that is often experienced when viewing art; most notably in galleries, museums and in various forms of public sculpture and architecture, such as, monuments, churches, and shrines. Conroy uses the duality of dark and light, colour and form, in her painting, installation and sound work, and with this, creates abstractions of various models of sacred art, iconism and veneration, in ritualistic manifestations.

Present State is a series of paintings based on cropped compositions of the human form. They record the body as present against a natural backdrop of the sky. ‘My intention is to divert attention away from the cultural cues we use to identify with figures in order to suggest that something else remains. There is an absurd and elegant characteristic of humanity viewed from this perspective and I identify with it through my paintings.’ Patrick Horan.

John is a multimedia artist from Dublin whose practice extends far beyond the limits of any one discipline but encompasses a spectrum of processes. While drawing and installation are the root elements in his work each finished piece is the end result of a synthesis of sculpture, sound and space.

We are pleased to present Zoo, Charlie Whisker’s first solo exhibition at Peppercanister Gallery. This show will see the coming together of a new body of work inspired by the artist’s unique life experiences. Whisker grew up in Bangor, Northern Ireland, and although he had an idyllic childhood, he was later exposed to the devastation of the Troubles. Whisker admits that the violence carried out in the North, as well as other extreme situations he encountered in areas such as Chernobyl, have stayed with him and continue to impact on his artwork to this day. Sweet and sour images tend to litter Whisker’s work, the tragic and the joyful. He likes to involve the viewer, giving them a forensic type scene to piece together in their heads. Whisker’s paintings convey a feeling of brave intensity, combining stark graphics and a cool light with an occasional burst of colour.

“Patrick Jones has a distinguished place in the continuing story of British colour abstraction: he is widely admired for his painterly virtuosity, and above all for the vibrancy of his colour and the boldness of his formal invention. Completely international in outlook, he has constantly looked for creative sustenance to the rich culture of late twentieth century non-figurative painting.” Mel Gooding

Revisit is a collection of work documenting photography-based art installations by visual artist Doreen Kennedy. The exhibition will include ‘Flower Bed’ and the more recent ‘Sea Bed’ installation.

Doreen Kennedy’s day-to-day practice is to visit, revisit and document a series of locations over a period of time. The work explores themes of the external environment, time-capture and the process of recording time through images on the experience of being in a particular location. The images provide evidence or findings and can be seen as a series of notes describing nostalgic memories of a location or object.

Picturing Derry, which is a partnership project between the Nerve Centre and City of Culture, brings together for the first time, some of the most iconic images of the Troubles in the city in one exhibition.

Legendary French photojournalist Gilles Caron’s previously unseen major body of work during the Battle of the Bogside in August 1969 forms a major part of the exhibition. It also includes the work of other visiting photographers from around the world as well as images by local news photographers and amateur photographers.

Kevin Kavanagh is pleased to present Selective Perspectives, a group show, featuring Robert Armstrong (IE), Christine Frerichs (USA), Paul Housley (UK), Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh (IE), Aliza Nisenbaum (MEX), Danny Rolph (UK) and Sonia Shiel (IE).

Responses by artists from Limerick Studios to the National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland.

Reflections on time and how artists work, with artists Felicity Clear, Anita Groener, Pamela Dunne, School of Architecture University of Limerick (SAUL).

Our annual digital arts festival returns! This years’ festival features both online and gallery based exhibitions, workshops a film shorts showcase, Symposium and lots more!

A haunting film work by leading Derry-born artist Willie Doherty opens to the public in the Annex at the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s temporary off-site exhibition spaces in Earlsfort Terrace on Tuesday 21 May 2013. Secretion,2012, first shown to critical acclaim at dOCUMENTA 13, draws on the possibilities of lost and forgotten narratives located somewhere between recent history and a near future. Shot on location in and around Kassel, Germany, the powerful narrative at times presents echoes of Doherty’s earlier work Ghost Story, 2007, pulling personal histories and experience to the foreground of the Kassel landscape. This same landscape served as the backdrop for much of the folklore collected by the Brothers Grimm while they lived and worked in Kassel.

Andrei Molodkin was born in Russia in 1966. Serving in the Russian Army, where he worked in Siberia delivering oil and transporting missiles, whilst eating bread smeared in oil for illicit highs, he began sketching in military-issue ballpoint pen. In a labour intensive process and with great precision, the artist draws precisely with a simple ballpoint pen on his gigantic canvas drawings. Molodkin also uses as oil from an organic resource into an aesthetic form, raising important questions regarding the role of oil within our contemporary Western culture. Molodkin’s most recent project has been his attempt to make oil from human corpses with a giant pressure cooker. For his exhibition at Void Molodkin will show work from his series ‘Direct From The Pipe’ alongside new work specifically made and in response to the context of Derry and Northern Ireland.

This is an exhibition of contemporary artworks from the twenty-seven Member States of the European Union, selected with the purpose of bringing European visual art, created in recent decades, to an Irish audience and to provide these artists with a platform during Ireland’s EU Presidency.

The Crawford Art Gallery in partnership with the Office of Public Works, is pleased to present an exhibition of sixteen contemporary artists entitled Prelude Speaker: Contemporary Castletown from April 29 to June 30, 2013 in the stunning setting of the historic Castletown House – in Celbridge, Co. Kildare.

Castletown House is Ireland’s most important and largest eighteenth century Palladian style house built between 1722 and 1729 for William Conolly (1662-1729). The son of a native Irish innkeeper from Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, he amassed huge wealth through his career in law and dealing in forfeited estates after the Williamite wars. The title of the exhibition Prelude Speaker: Contemporary Castletown alludes to Conolly’s appointment as Speaker of the Irish House of Commons in 1715, before becoming one the three Lord Justices who administered the country during the frequent absences of the Lord Lieutenant.

I knOw yoU is a dynamic exhibition by a new generation of young European artists. The exhibition takes a fresh look at contemporary art in Europe as a reflection of the exchange and openness that exists between artists working today. I knOw yoU examines the idea of cultural capital; what it means to be European; and ideas at the core of the financial heart of Europe. This group exhibition has an open curatorial approach that allows each artist to nominate another artist of their choosing. Uniquely, this can be from any discipline they connect with (ie. a poet, philosopher, musician, scientist, chef, gardener, artist etc.), either on a collaborative or stand-alone basis, thereby extending the connection point for each artists work.

Artists’ Gardens is part of Void Sites; a new initiative that extends Void’s activities to locations around the city and its hinterland, involving three major off site projects; Artist’s Gardens, Resonance FM and Partition.

2013 marks the first year of the UK City of Culture in Derry. Void has established itself as a pioneering gallery and cultural organisation that has never compromised or failed in its mission to deliver a challenging, relevant and inspiring programme of Contemporary Art to both Northern Irish and global audiences. Organisations such as Void have made an invaluable contribution to a dynamic Northern Irish Arts scene, and have played a crucial role in securing the legacy of Derry as a culturally vibrant city. As this is such a special year for the city and the organisation, Void have curated a seminal programme, of offsite projects and exhibitions. This programme demonstrates why the city has won this award and how a gallery exhibiting Contemporary Art can make an incredible difference to a communityʼ s culture.

While the notion of a people’s identity being embedded in the landscape is very ancient, as revealed in the careful siting of Neolithic monuments such as Newgrange or the Bronze Age stone circle at Drombeg, the idea of the Irish landscape and its people being synonymous has never disappeared over the centuries. The origins of place-names forms the basis of the Dinnseanchas, or topographical poems, many of which date to the Early Christian Period and even earlier. In the seventeenth century there was a revival of interest in landscape, inspired by the Classical writers of Greece and Rome. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the “Grand Tour” led wealthy British and Irish tourists through France and on to Florence and Rome. The education of these travellers was not considered complete unless they had studied Classical writers such as Horace, Virgil and Cicero. They brought back glowing accounts of the beauties of the Italian landscape, while the bay of Naples and Vesuvius were the subject of paintings acquired to embellish houses in Ireland.

The Poetry Project brings you contemporary Irish video art and poetry for free each Monday. Sign up online at www.thepoetryproject.ie, and each Monday a new video and poem will be emailed to your inbox. What better way to start the week?