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

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

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.

Full Spectrum features work by Visual Communication and Multimedia students. The Media Communications Degree Show is a highly anticipated annual event where many graduates are recruited for industry on the strength of their displays.

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).

Over the weekend of Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th of May 2013, Landing Place presents a series of contemporary art works by Sven Anderson, Aoife Desmond, Fiona McDonald and Ema Nik Thomas, which explore the Pigeon House Precinct and its context in the Poolbeg Peninsula, Dublin Bay. Through collaborative work, a series of small research events and the activation of a studio space at Pigeon House Hotel, four new pieces of work in sound, film, installation and performance have been developed between January and May 2013. Landing Place is a Commonage commissioned project, curated by Hollie Kearns and Rosie Lynch and developed in partnership with Dublin City Council Heritage Office.

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!

The Eileen Champion Poole Trust is delighted to present ‘A Story about the History of Dún Laoghaire: The Private Collection of Eileen Champion Poole’ in association with visual artist Sabina Mac Mahon.

Following an open call made by dlr Arts in 2012 Mac Mahon was selected as the recipient of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council’s inaugural Concourse Award, an exhibition award designed to provide the general public with an opportunity to engage with contemporary visual arts practice in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown while also supporting the work of a local artist.

The resulting exhibition, ‘A Story about the History of Dún Laoghaire’ tells the story of the greater Dún Laoghaire area through the work of Eileen Champion Poole, a pioneering but sadly now largely forgotten antiquarian, amateur archaeologist, etymologist, ethnographer, local historian, novelist, watercolourist and photographer. She grew up in Kilbogget House in Cabinteely and opened her first museum at the age of ten. By the age of 12 she was employing a part-time assistant and had amassed a collection of over 700 items relating to the history of the greater Dún Laoghaire area.

Opening Reception Thursday 23 May, 6 – 8pm

Void invites you to join us to launch a new project that celebrates and maps the Contemporary Art programme of the 2013 City of Culture.

powerS + √ roots is the second exhibition informed by a longstanding critical dialogue between artists Dave Madigan and Méadhbh O’Connor. Here, the two artists explore their interests in networks and energy systems, both natural and man-made.

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 exhibition of paintings and drawings by Marie Hanlon deals with spatial relationships, flat surface and the illusion of depth. The title refers to the repositioning of a form along a diagonal axis, thereby changing the dynamic of the work. The word ‘TILT’ contains within itself an inherent contradiction in that the strict vertical and horizontal letter forms are at odds with the words meaning. In this sense TILT becomes a metaphor for the work itself in which shifting forms play out within strict parameters.

With ‘Rory Mullen: Hours of Idleness’, Rory presents a new body of work completed during his six-month graduate residency at the National Sculpture Factory. Comprising drawings, video and small-scale sculpture, this exhibition evidences a move away from the immersive cardboard installations stemming from his degree show, which garnered him critical acclaim. Conceptually however, he continues to investigate ideas of the everyday and the useless, filtered through the lens of his own particularly anarchic humour and a defiantly ‘anti-slick’ aesthetic.

Force 12 is a group exhibition of 12 exceptional artists showcasing powerful, thought provoking work, in various forms of painting and sculpture. It will include some of Peppercanister Gallery’s regular exhibitors as well as exciting first time contributor Peter Burns whose contemporary visual dramas, based on mythology, offer an exciting portal into another world.