The Voyage

CB1 Gallery Los Angeles 

Brian duggan, Adam Gibney

Nov 5th – Dec 4th 2016

Dublin based curators Matthew Nevin & Ciara Scanlan of MART have embarked on a 3 year initiative to bring leading and emerging contemporary Irish art to Los Angeles through their series ‘Activating Pangea’.

This the second exhibition in the series titled ‘Activating Pangea: The Voyage’  showcases recent work by Irish Artists Brian Duggan and Adam Gibney. It reflects on geopolitics over time and space, as we transverse language and negotiate real and imagined places in a global context. The artworks crossing in the gallery are Adam Gibney’s ‘Euclid, I miss you…’ and Brian Duggan’s ‘A Cause for concern but not alarm’.

Gibney’s work targets the quest for certainty. He states, “Man has created an abstract language in Mathematics to convey underlying governing principles of our reality, and in so doing a platonic world is created. This world can often become difficult or impossible to  convey  in  everyday  language;  it  is  in  these  places  that  our  imagination  and perception are tested.” In this exhibition the points of which Gibney’s work targets reality, linguistics and technologies intermingle with the symbolic annotations of the everyday.

Duggan’s work is informed by the way in which we live now. Duggan’s work questions the aspirations and assumptions that are interlinked within the scientific and social framework of energy consumption and legacy planning. The systems in place are always evolving, attempting to catch up to an elusive plateau that is inherently unstable. Through the work presented here Duggan “plunges the viewer into a realm where seemingly casual navigation of space bespeaks chilling (hi)stories”

‘The Voyage’ allows the visitor to refocus their own experiences and memories through the interpretation and assimilation of language and analyse their own exploitative journeys through space and time. Focusing on the quest for answers of our own existence and our place within an imagined world without borders, without physical and cultural barriers, the exhibition suggests new ways of being and thinking, while investigating the conditions of concerning events and symbolics of reality.

All Shimmers Here

Ali Kirby and Cliodhna Timoney

The MART Gallery, Rathmines

27 October – 12 November, 2016

Ali Kirby and Cliodhna Timoney will both present new work in this upcoming two person exhibition selected through the Fire Station Artist’s Studios Residency Award 2016.

Kirby’s sculptural interventions will respond directly to the architecture transforming the physical space of the front gallery with large scale works that draw our attention to colour, scale and presence, while Timoney will exhibit a family of objects manifested through a process of trial and error. These objects relate to the encounter between the manufactured and the handmade and the interaction between body and material. This family will materialize as an installation in MART’s back gallery. This exhibition will be accompanied by a text by Lucy Elvis.

Ali Kirby (b. Dublin, Ireland) graduated in 2014 with first class honours in Fine Art from LSAD, specialising in Sculpture & Combined Media. Kirby is the recipient of the Fire Station Artist’s Studios Sculpture Workshop Award & Bursary 2016 and the RHA Studio Residency Award 2015. Recent exhibitions include Describing Architecture – Memory and Place (2015) City Assembly House, Dublin, the 185th RHA Annual Exhibition (2015) Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Periodical Review #4 (2015) Ormston House, Limerick, Periodical Review #4 (2014) Pallas Projects, Dublin, Essays for the House of Memory (2014) Ormston House, Limerick, Single Channel (2013) Chartier Arts Venue, Connecticut, USA, Undertow (2012) the LAB, Dublin and Undertow (2011) Ormston House, Limerick.

Cliodhna Timoney (b.1993) is a visual artist currently based between Donegal and Dublin. Since graduating from IADT Visual Arts Practice with a first class honours in 2015, Timoney joined the Board of Directors of 126 Artist Run Gallery and subsequently was awarded the Fire Station Artist’s Studios Sculpture Award 2016. Recent exhibitions include ‘Very Good Waves Now’ Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2016), ‘A Knowing Nature’, The Dock, Leitrim (2016), ‘IADT Graduate Exhibition’, Dublin (2015) ‘The Beholder’s Share, IMMA, Dublin (2015),’Have a nice Life’,Vapaan Taiteen Tila, Helsinki (2014) and ‘ An Awkward Encounter, Galleria FAFA,Helsinki (2014).

This Exhibition was kindly supported by Fire Station Artist Studios Dublin and MART Gallery Rathmines.

Phantoms – Marc Behrens

The MART Gallery, Rathmines.

5 – 22 October 2016

Marc Behrens presents his solo exhibition «Phantoms» at MART as an interconnected sound and object array. The exhibition focuses mainly on the sound installations «Unit», «The Unknown» and «White Phantoms» and integrates them with a number of smaller sculptural works.  Phantoms are the placeholders for induced memories, imaginary places, ideas, entities or objects that you can only relate to by way of someone else’s accounts, since you have not been there, since you have not been with them. Marc Behrens materializes his own phantoms and tells their stories through combinations of sound and physical objects. All those materials, mostly organic but transmutable, all those sound objects are vibrations, reshaped, redefined. Like phantoms not of the artist’s body, but of the artist’s ideas and spiritual acts.

Artist Website: www.marcbehrens.com

Supported by: Goethe-Institut Irland

With Special Thanks to David Stalling for initiating the collaboration.

Glitch Festival 2016

RUA RED South Dublin Arts Centre

28th May – 11th June 2016

Curated in 2016 by Ciara Scanlan + Matthew Nevin.

Elaine Leader, Margaret O’Brien, Helen McMahon, Janna Kemperman and Kevin Freeney of Algorithm in collaboration with CLU, Sinead Mc Donald and Aileen Drohan, Seoidín O’Sullivan, Dr. Katherine Nolan, Valerie Connor, Leah Hilliard, Dr. Kylie Jarret and Dr. Paula Quigley.

This year RUA RED has joined forces with MART to present the 5th iteration of /Glitch, an interactive digital festival that brings together artists utilising media and technology.

/Glitch Festival 2016: Risk Assessment will be hosted primarily in RUA RED Gallery Tallaght with an accompanying exhibition in The Mart Gallery, Rathmines. Festival curators Ciara Scanlan and Matthew Nevin have devised a risk based curatorial outline for an exhibition format with parameters, which the participating artists may work within or destroy. The festival will focus on live durational events and collaboration between digital and live processes.

The curators have chosen predominantly all female participants, performers and visual artists to make work exploring the notion of danger and risk within art making and society. The participants will produce live experiential artworks. The curators will create a stage for the artists to react to: a gallery ‘under construction’. Objects associated with building industry shall occupy the space ready for alteration, interaction and modifying their mechanics, aesthetics and behaviours.

The artworks will react and interplay with this spectacle to create interactive ‘dangerous & reactionary’ artworks, utilising engineering and programming to enhance the user experience and interaction with the audience. The echoes of the collapse of the construction industry in Ireland has created a society in fear of a repeat bubble already forming in the city. A hesitation to taking risks has meant many suburban and rural towns lay dormant, producing a culture of a ‘people in waiting’. 

For 2016 the curators want to challenge this fear and become cultural risk activators, inviting artists who work under this umbrella to push the ‘safety’ of the gallery into a challenging experience for artists, curators and audience.

Supermarket Art Fair 2016

MART at Supermarket

James L Hayes, Adam Gibney, Ruby Wallis, Margaret O’Brien, Katherine Nolan

Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm

April 2016

As part of their endeavours to provide creative platforms MART presents the work of five leading Irish contemporary artists at Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm. The show forms part of an on-going programme of exhibitions curated by MART to promote Irish art in international contemporary art markets in Europe and the US.

Since 2007 MART has sought to create opportunities by conceiving creative platforms to support artists from all stages of their careers to test new ground. Projects have included exhibitions across Ireland, the U.K, Central Eastern Europe, North America and Japan. In 2013 MART began a project to renovate the fire station in Rathmines, Dublin and now supports over 100 members in 7 studio buildings, and includes a Gallery, Project Space and International residency.

SUPERMARKET is an international artist-run art fair for artist-run galleries and other artists’ initiative. It has featured exhibitors from more than 50 countries, all part of a growing international trend of artist-run galleries, project spaces, artist collectives and other artists’ initiatives.

Supermarket Art Fair

Svarta Huset

Telefonplan, Stockholm

Generously supported by Culture Ireland

Activating Pangea

DAC Gallery, Los Angeles

Sofie Loscher, Jonathan Mayhew, Margaret O’Brien, Gearoid O’Dea

April 2016 

‘Activating Pangea’ is three-year series of exhibitions curated by MART {Dublin}, who will work with targeted Los Angeles based galleries and art fairs, to strategically promote leading Irish Contemporary Visual Artists.

This first exhibition in the series seeks to activate Pangea, an imagining of our pre-human world without borders, without physical and cultural barriers that prevent new ways of being and thinking. ‘Activating Pangea’ will showcase artwork reflecting on geopolitics and how we understand our own identity and culture over time and space, as we transverse and negotiate real and imagined places in a global context.  Artists create imagined spaces and show us a world that can never exist, it is their role to present reality through a twisted and subverted looking-glass. Imagined places can exaggerate and distort reality; the experience of being in places we have pre-conceived seems to force a new reality upon us.

Globalisation, and increased movement and communication across place and national borders, has created both a crisis and a critical rethinking of cultural identity. And yet recent anxieties emerging in the context of an immigration crisis in europe and the middle east, have seen the tightening of national boundaries. The exhibition series will see artists produce work that reflects on how diaspora and migration, the movement of people and cultures across space, has the ability to question fixed ideas of identity.  

Though genetic codes and their cultural inscriptions each person takes their ‘brand’ wherever they go. And yet our experiences of our own identity as we age over time, can make it problematic to hold on to a persistent identity; our understanding of a unique set of characteristics, qualities and features that make us who we are. In particular they will reflect on experiences of Irish Cultural Identity and Diaspora.

Generously Supported by Culture Ireland