Merciful Hour presents Magnetic Observatory

August 11th & 12th.

A film, sound, and live performance programmed event running for two days, focusing on the forces that push and pull our thoughts and actions, from the moon that controls the ebb and flow of the tides to the animal instincts that drive our needs and desires. A showcase of a selection of contemporary national and international artists making time-based work, drawing connections and divides, attractions and repulsions, between their work and the influence of their geographical locations on their recordings and renderings, much like the data collected from magnetic observatories and their readings.

How the light gets in: an urban foraging and anthotype workshop

From the Past to the Present: Crafting History through Banner Making

Livestock Live Art Event – 29th April 2023

Featured Artists: Ciara Rodgers, Dylan Ryan, Dia Thomas.The Ljilja, Day Magee

About Come What May

May Day, or Labour Day, is one of multiple histories – of spiritual and political ritual, where bodies gather and communicate themselves in public space. It is in ritual where ideas may literally characterise themselves through bodies, mythologising the past and divining the future in living, performed iconographies. Ritual bridges past and future in the form of a present through the collective witness of an audience. Performance, thereby, is a style of time travel. What takes place this evening are artists who time travel in style: rituals, demonstrations, or any such happenings that aim to tell the future, question the past, and receive the present.

All images taken by John Foley.

Livestock is an artist-led initiative set up to provide opportunities for performers to show new or evolving work. Livestock was established in 2010 at The Market Studios, Dublin. It was conceived of by artists for artists. Our bi-monthly events aim to create a positive and welcoming environment where artists can present their live work to an audience. We strive for performance as a means to facilitate relationships and create a space for dialogue. Livestock has collaborated with Dublin Live Art Festival (DLAF), MART, The Complex and Bealtine Festival. The platform is currently curated by Fay and Katherine Nolan.

https://livestock-art.com

From the Past to the Present: Crafting History through Banner Making

The Irish Contemporaries {ii}

THE IRISH CONTEMPORARIES EXHIBITION {ii}

You are invited to the Reception of the second annual CIACLA Irish Contemporaries Visual Art exhibition held on Saturday July 8th 2023 from 2-4pm at 

Building Bridges Art Exchange, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, Los Angeles. 

Full info over at CIACLA’s Website here.

CIACLA – The Contemporary Irish Center Los Angeles, in partnership with Building Bridges Art Exchange and The MART Gallery & Studios Dublin, are proud to invite you to the launch of the visual arts group exhibition The Irish Contemporaries {ii}, curated by Ciara Scanlan and Matthew Nevin, which includes the highlighted showcase of new work by CIACLA’s Summer 2023 Artist in Residence Shane Keisuke Berkery.

Featured Artists: Artists: Adam Brazil, Austin Ivers, Brenda Oona Welsh, Catherine Davison, Chris O’Mahony, Christopher Clery, Clare French, Conn McCarrick, Gail Ritchie, Greta Levins, Katherine Nolan, Maria Mollohan, Michael Comer, Ohhi Ohno, Reuben Brown, Riki Matsuda, Rozarii Lynch, Shane Keisuke Berkery, Siobhán Ó Mócháin, Breathnach Sionnan Wood, Stephen Moynes, and Tom Dowling.

Exhibition Runs to July 29th | Open Tuesday – Saturdays 12-6pm 

Events include: Our monthly Creative Network Meetup coinciding with the exhibition opening on July 8th at 2pm and a Family Arts & Crafts Meet Up on July 15th at 2pm. {More info below}

Location: Building Bridges Art Exchange, Unit F2, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, LA, CA. 90404 – google maps

The Irish Contemporaries {ii} is a captivating exhibition that celebrates the diverse talents of contemporary artists based in Los Angeles County, USA, and a curated selection of artists operating out of four distinguished Artist Studios in Ireland: MART Studios, Sample Studios Cork, QSS Belfast and Limerick Printmakers.

“This exciting group exhibition showcases a mix of visual art; painting, sculpture, illustration, performance, print and film, a unique assemblage aiming to cast a spotlight on the captivating blend of techniques, narratives, and perspectives that characterises the contemporary art scene in both locales.” 

~ Co Curator Matthew Nevin.

Family Arts & Crafts Meet Up – July 15th, 2-4pm. 

Join us for a fun afternoon of creativity and chats at our Family Arts & Crafts Meet Up on July 15th at 2pm. Coordinated by CIACLA’s Education & Wellbeing Coordinator, Katriona Woods, we invite families to come along to meet, chat and casually engage with our exhibition in a fun creative environment. 

This meetup warmly welcomes all children along with their parents/guardians for some fun with arts & crafts, to foster their artistic skills through a variety of engaging activities. The meetup promises laughter, creativity, and even a chance to practise a few words ‘as Gaeilge’ (in Irish). 

To sign up for tickets, simply send an email with your name, your children’s names, and their ages to info@ciacla.com. Places are limited. Don’t miss out on this memorable experience. We can’t wait to see you there!

Kindly Supported By:

This exhibition has been made possible with support from the Government of Ireland Emigrant Support Programme, Culture Ireland, California Arts Council, LA County Arts Commission, CIACLA, MART Gallery & Studios and Building Bridges Art Exchange.

MART Awards Exhibition 2023

Featuring: Maya Brezing, Sophie Béhal,

Curated by Ciara Scanlan

Exhibition Runs April 1-14th | Open Wed-Sat 1-6pm 

Opening Reception Saturday 1st April at 1pm.

The MART Gallery, 190A Rathmines Road Lower. – map link

www.mart.ie 

This annual exhibition aims to provide a showcase and support opportunity to artists whose work is both engaging and experimental. The exhibition presents artists selected through partnerships; Maya Brezing was selected from the MART & Fingal Arts Office Graduate Award and successfully received a one year studio at MART Studios alongside curatorial and financial support for the exhibition and Sophie Béhal was selected from Fire Station Artists’ Studios Digital Media Award. 

Sophie Béhal is a visual artist whose work usually manifests itself as sculptural installation, often combining traditional sculptural materials of steel, clay and plaster with more ephemeral aspects of light and sound. Recent exhibitions: With a View, Chocolate Factory, Dublin 2022, Dublin Art Book Fair, TBG+S, 2022 +2021; Projects: The Postal Project, Carlow Arts Festival 2021, Firestation Artists Sculpture Awardee 2022; Publications: Firestation FileNotes 2023 (Upcoming). She holds a BA in Fine Art from Crawford, Cork, 2012 and an MA in Art, Research and Collaboration from IADT, Dublin, 2018 with a term spent in Taideyliopisto, Helsinki. http://www.sophiebehal.com/

Maya Brezing an Irish artist working and living in Dublin. She is a recent graduate of NCAD with a BA (Hons) Degree in Fine Art specialising in printmaking. She was awarded the Black Church Print Studio Graduate Award 2022 for her exhibition ‘Traces of Tomorrow’, an installation of prints and assemblages that looked at nature reclaiming derelict buildings. Her work is held in the Office of Public works, St. Vincent’s University Hospital and the DCU art collection. She recently started the Fingal Recent Graduate residency at MART Gallery and Studios. https://www.blackchurchprint.ie/artist/brezing-maya/ 

The exhibition is supported by MART Gallery, Fingal Arts Office and Fire Station Artists’ Studios.

Open Studios Event at The MART Grainstore Studios

On Sunday March 26th | 1-3pm MART Celebrated an Open Studios Event at our MART Studios at The Grainstore Cabinteely Park

Live Music by Gráinne Hunt!

We welcomed visitors to our iconic former grainstore building in the heart of Cabinteely Park which houses 7 local Artists utilising the building as Artist & Creative Studios. Public met our talented artists and see their amazing works, explore our large bright studios, and experience the creative environment we provide for artists. A real opportunity to connect with our community, purchase art and get inspired!

Artists in these studios include: Maura Culbert, Ruth O’Mahony-Brady, Burnell Mc Kenna, Grace Sexton, Oona Hyland, Nonnie Hilton, Bobby Fitzgerald.

About MART’s Grainstore Studios Building:

This former grainstore is right in the heart of Cabinteely Park Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin.  This wonderful building is host a collection of large bright studios and some smaller studios. A comfortable and quiet space, these studios are home to a number of creatives and artists. The space serves as a tidy, tranquil working environment. – https://mart.ie/portfolio-item/the-grainstore/

Of Other, And Possibility – Samir Mahmood

An Exhibition in partnership with Backwater Artists Network

Opening Saturday 11th March at 1pm.

Runs to Friday 24 March

Wednesday – Saturday, 1.00pm to 6.00pm

The MART Gallery, 190A Rathmines Road Lower. – map link

Curated by Rachel Botha.

Of other, and possibility is Samir Mahmood’s first solo exhibition of new and existing artwork including painting, digital collage and photography. The exhibition explores experiences of identity, migration and spirituality. Mahmood bravely uses the queer body to consider human vulnerability and assess its connection to the world. In doing, the work is an attempt to offer a liberating new reality. Summarised in the words of José Esteban Muñoz “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”

‘Ghair‘, the Urdu word for ‘other’ or ‘stranger’ and is articulated throughout the exhibition – it is an attempt to confront the negative distance and separation a person or group experiences in society. In this context, there’s an ownership over otherness. At the centre of Mahmood’s art practice is the philosophy of ‘non-duality’, the human experience of oneness with all things and the importance of interdependence. This exhibition is an opportunity to reflect and imagine new ways of looking and thinking about how we live, in the hope to transcend it.

Samir Mahmood is a Backwater Artists Network member and studio member at MART Studios, Galway.

Kindly supported by The Arts Council, Cork City Council, MART Gallery and Backwater Artists Studios.

Now that’s what I call Vault

An Exhibition in partnership with Vault Studios

Opening Reception Saturday 18th February 2023 at 1pm.

Open Wed – Sat: 1-6pm | Runs to March 3rd 2023

The MART Gallery, 190A Rathmines Road Lower. – map link

Featured Artists: Laura Nelson, Cathy Scullion, John Baucher, Ruth Crothers, FGB, Linda McBurney, Dragos Musat, Raquel Amat, Wilhelmina Peace,  Rob Hilken,  Cikada Circus, Jonathan Brennan,  KenEvil and Snatch Circus,  Ashton,  Michael McEvoy, Jamie Harper,  Joshua Burnside,  Leo Boyd,  Ed Reynolds,  Margaret Woods,  Neal Campbell. Hit The North,  Sally O’Dowd,  Sinead O’Neill Nicholl.

Vault Artist Studios is a Belfast based community driven, not-for-profit artist-led charity that provides affordable workspaces to our 115 members which include international and award winning artists from across a wide range of creative disciplines and practices.

Now That’s What I Call Vault is a collection of the best pieces from each of the 23 exhibitions held in the Vault Canteen Gallery in 2022.

In 2022 a small group of members ran a year-long gallery program of exhibitions and art events under the title Now That’s What I Call Vault, 2022. Across 9 months (from March until December) the Vault Canteen Gallery held 23 exhibitions that demonstrated the eclectic range of art practices of the studio members.

This exhibition showcases some of the diverse range of talents of the members of the studio group, from musicians to 3D video and comic artists, sculptors and visual artists, to circus performers and contemporary dancers.

This exhibition has kindly been supported by The Arts Council of Ireland.

Time Sensitive: Leeward

An Exhibition in partnership with Cow House Studios 

Runs Jan 28th – Feb 10th 2023

Open Wed – Sat: 1-6pm

The MART Gallery, 190A Rathmines Road Lower. – map link

“Time Sensitive: Leeward” presents a series of reflections and observations rooted in the artists’ lived experiences of the Rural(s). Artists Anne Vetter, Frank Abruzzese, Karl Logge & Marta Romani, Laurence O’Toole, Rosie O’Gorman, Sarah Ellen Lundy and curator Karla Sánchez, have all resided for long periods in both city and countryside, the latter being the place where, in the last several years, they have spent most of their time.

The Rural is not a unified and defined space; it is hybrid, it is complex. There are, also, multiple discourses of rurality. The social construction of the rural does not occur in a vacuum, it is embedded in networks of social, economic, and political relations, now very often directed from, or based in cities. Its representations often become detached from the referent of rural space and are disseminated and transported through global networks. The idea of the rural materializes in rural localities through social, economic, and political relations involving a variety of actors, both human and non-human.

The Rural has for long been a concept enveloped in prejudices and misunderstandings. It is a cultural construction permanently imagined and re-imagined. It is also an idea key to our relationships with and understanding of nature and the environment.

This exhibition comprises a mix of recent work: photographs, drawings, tapestries, installations, and video pieces. Animal life and death are present in the work of Sarah Ellen Lundy and the enigmatic, organic, ink drawings by Rosie O’Gorman. Every-day life, in all its joy and marvelous monotony, is captured in the photographs of Frank Abruzzese and those of Anne Vetter. An intense presence of the forest, and our perceptions of it, appear in the work of Laurence O’Toole, and in the tapestries and work by Karl Logge & Marta Romani we are faced with rituals and almost extinct traditions that once allowed the survival of our species.

It is, perhaps, in the rural, that our society can find some of the most effective and long-lasting solutions that we are all desperately searching for to improve the conditions for everyone’s future.  And, while the title “Time Sensitive” suggests there is an urgency to make this happen; what if this process starts only by truly becoming aware of ourselves in the present, paying close attention to how we spend our time and why, becoming sensitive to time.

“Leeward” was a four-week residency at Cow House Studios, Wexford, in April of 2022. Together, artists and curator, explored prevalent attitudes and discourses around the Rural through a considered process that included a discussion of a selected list of readings and films as well as visits to various farms (some traditional, some following regenerative agriculture) a visit to and conversations with researchers from Teagasc, as well as wool traders, different families living in the countryside, and other art professionals. The aim was to have a better understanding of how the countryside works, what it needs, and what it can offer, including possible alternative scenarios for the future of the world. Leeward refers to the side of a mountain sheltered from the wind.

Karla Sánchez Zepeda O’Connell is an art historian, educator, and farmer (regenerative agriculture). Originally from Mexico City, she is founder and director of Blackbird Cultur-Lab, an experimental cultural laboratory based on a farm in County Wexford.

Anne Vetter lives and works in California and Massachusetts. They are a queer, trans non-binary Jew. Their work is focused on play, family systems, performance, and the fluidity of identity. They graduated Magna Cum Laude from Colby College (2017) with theses in Anthropology, Art, and Poetry. Vetter’s work has been featured in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, the Atlantic, the Washington Post Magazine and the Strange Fire Collective. In 2023, Vetter will open a solo show at the Allen Priebe Gallery, UW Oshkosh. Their work has been included in exhibitions at Huxley Parlour in London, EN, The Colby Museum of Art, Filter Photo, Black Bird Cultur Lab, the Humble Arts Foundation, Placing Political Art, and The Curated Fridge, among others.

Frank Abruzzese is an artist, educator, and Co-Director of Cow House Studios, the long-term project that he and his wife, Rosie O’Gorman, Co-Founded in 2008 at her ancestral homeplace in County Wexford. Along with Rosie, Frank is responsible for strategic planning, creative direction, curriculum development, and hospitality at Cow House, and this work now deeply informs his creative practice. As a photographer, Frank documents his surroundings and the patterns of behavior over time of those closest to him. How might daily practice work to shape an unexpected life? Considering his role as an educator, father, and host, Frank attempts to reflect a broader ethos of generosity, empathy, and commitment to creative production, giving form to a continually unfolding character of living. Originally from Philadelphia, Frank studied Moving Image Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. Frank continues to exhibit his work in both Ireland and abroad.

Karl Logge & Marta Romani from Sydney, Australia, and Brescia, North Italy, respectively, are husband and wife artist-team living and working in Sardinia, Italy. Their joint practice is influenced by the deep time of places, cycles, seasons, and the ancient art of weaving. Their work is closely connected to nature, territory, and cultural memory. Their community-driven projects engage weaving to explore the quality and care that connect us with the natural world and become entangled in its creative energy.

Laurence O’Toole has a graphic design and metalworking background and lives near Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford. O’Toole’s practice responds to the natural environment with consideration for science/pseudo-science boundary, modern mythology, and anxiety. His multidisciplinary practice can range from staged scenes to highly crafted pieces. He aims to initiate a connection with the natural and the cosmological, inviting the viewer to contemplate the unnatural forces that impact them.

Rosie O’Gorman lives in her native county Wexford. She graduated with a BA in Art and Design Education from NCAD, and received the Larkin Memorial Award for teaching, and the Taylor Award for painting. With the support of a Fulbright Scholarship, she attended the San Francisco Art Institute, receiving her MFA in 2004. On returning to Ireland, she established Cow House Studios with her husband Frank Abruzzese at her ancestral home on the foothills of the Blackstairs Mountain. Guided by her son’s curiosity for and instincts within the natural world, and a worrisome estrangement from the environment, her latest work explores the complexities and closeness of birth and death, of beauty and the grotesque, wildness and domesticity, fear and comfort, knowledge and instinct, of mythologies and bodily experience.

Sarah Ellen Lundy is a visual artist from South County Sligo; her studio practice is preoccupied with spaces and systems, predominantly the design of geometry and the cyclical systems of the natural world. Through the use of moving image, assemblage, and ephemeral performance materials, the works endeavour to negotiate provocative arrangements and question autonomy in the face of innate and applied homogenization.

This exhibition has kindly been supported by The Arts Council of Ireland.