TIME, LOCATION & SPACE
thursday, may 28th 2009, 6-8pm
Curated by Aoife Tunney
Open: 12-5pm Mon/Tues 29th & 30th June, Thurs & Friday 9th & 10th July, Mon-Friday 13-17th July
work.in.space - office
connaught house,
burlington road, off mespil rd.
dublin 4
email: aoife.tunney@gmail.com
www.workinspace.org
space
artists
curatorial note
Ra di Martino
Italian video artist Ra di Martino’s work moves in between theatre and direct video art, using characters, the environment where the work is filmed and archival material to compose her contexts. In her work ‘In between’, an older work shown in work.in.space, she uses the environment of a housing project ‘The Dream’ and the camera’s movement directs two characters and their emotional interaction on a empty street in Rome. Di Martino touches on notions of inner space and outer space and how people might get lost in between them.
www.radimartino.com
Lee Welch
Welch’s practice is born of a desire for exploration and discovery. He produces drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos and installations. These works are often accompanied by soundtracks, which draw on aspects of theatre, history, literature and music.
A sense of uncertainty develops as the viewer navigates his installations; multiple references unfold gradually over time ensuring that meaning is perpetually evolving and mutating. Welch uses this area of confusion to investigate the complex, shifting and often contradictory relationships between people and their environments and the links between nature, culture and the commodified world.
Aleana Egan
Aleana Egan’s works are based on precise observations of her immediate surroundings, which may be the landscape of her hometown of Dun Laoghaire near Dublin or the specific situation of an exhibition venue. Relying on intuitive processes, she translates these observations into abstract sculptures, relief works, collages and drawings with the aid of manual techniques such as modelling, bricolage and dyeing. She frequently uses fragmented sentences from literary texts as the titles of her works, for example ended casually in the water (2008), a phrase borrowed from the writer Iris Murdoch. This use of literature and its relation to abstract forms reflects the artist’s keen interest in the non-linguistic description of experience. Egan’s works could be called compressed images of memory: they refer to re-imagined moods of individual moments of experience without claiming to represent these exactly and show them as independent artistic forms.
Miguel Mitlag
Mitlag works with spatial recording of rooms in both 3d and 1d work. The ¨New Models¨ series of photos (2006), his interest was placed in the way real estate agents produce standard showrooms to sell apartments, and by doing this they reshape a lifestyle showing the clients the most banal aspects of daily life. He took this idea and elaborated with the subjects he placed in these made up rooms. Keeping the recorded photograph as the artwork.
Mitlag has expanded on this representation of a fictional physical space, and re-elaborated the way space is presented in the image to the way space is experienced in the real, as built objects and installations.
Linda Quinlan
In her work she rapidly travels back and forth considering the mundane to the marvelous: exploring; gathering; avidly pursuing lines of enquiry beyond the everyday world. This investigation is driven by a curiosity that delves into a variety of subjects from Max Kaemper’s motives for cave exploration to Eileen Gray’s position on architecture, and thenceforth to Joseph Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness. Living and haunted by these subjects, points of connection begin to emerge allowing the narrative to take shape and direction.
Often drawn to the hidden, overlooked and undefined, Quinlan’s work harbors exemplary accounts of individuals, brave enough to seize time, hold it and fill it with responsibility.
Rhona Byrne
Byrne makes objects; site-specific, gallery and context-based installations; films; publications and collaborative event-based projects. These projects focus on the interplay between people and their surroundings at both macro and micro levels. Byrne's work explores and engages with the multilayered surfaces and workings of the built environment and navigates intangible and transient layers of physical, mental and social space.
Karl Burke
Karl Burke is a interdisciplinary artist and active musician whose practice includes sculpture, sound, installation works, photography and film. A site-specific practice these pieces act as a three dimensional notebook or diary tracing space, time and the individual. By using the physical language of three dimensions he hopes to cause the viewer to not just perceive the artwork but to cause an inward analysis.
Burke’s work is concerned with our relationship to and perceptions of our three dimensional world and endeavors to form a physical and emotive relationship between the art object space/place and the viewer.
www.karlburke.com
Declan Clarke
With his insightful political awareness in his work Clarke shows a captivation with the consequential and apparently inconsequential, and the interstices between the two. Turning to history, he intertwines personal subjectivities and actions with grand narratives and the edifices of power, which can never be entirely separate. It is the remnants of the past within the present and an assertion of the haphazard nature and incompatibility of hindsight, which are referenced in his work.
curatorial note
work.in.space
You step into this space. You leave something behind you and within your senses, your future and your past become one. A kind of site-orientation cleansing takes place- to which you can only surrender.
The point of departure for this site-specific project was the moment I stepped onto Level 1, Connaught House, D4. It is a floor plan, with its unfinished aesthetic poised with possibility and drama inherent. The room was there baring all and waiting for a purpose.
What this space was built for is immediately recognisable: an office-scenario for people to labour in. But as this space lies empty it begs the question, what are we first, people who work or workers who people?
"Labor is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert…It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this is to an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labor created man itself." Frederick Engels asserted in 1939.
Labour is a significant part of our everyday life with our identity and self esteem wrapped up in what we do.
What is of interest to me is to investigate what motivates us to work and how we perceive the situation for that work to take place.
With ‘Work.in.space’, I wanted to offer a space in which 'work' can take place, in which a phenomenological and intellectual response could happen between the artist, the space, their work, and the audience.
I have approached artists whose work is diverse in its practices but which touch on certain conceptual threads such as exploring architectural, political, psychological, emotional, literal, empirical and ephemeral elements of a given space and the theoretical frameworks behind it.
As a space, which is left in a post-boom paralysis, the narratives and fictional interpretations are open. This site offers a place in which to expand knowledge and experience of self and others; a place for coming to consciousness; reflection as a transformative space and as a revelatory space. Every aspect of the room provides a different viewpoint or “secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination”. The poetics of space, Gaston Bachelard.
Aoife Tunney