Six Memos presents Species of Space, a day of talks at the Limerick School of Art & Design, LIT, Clare Street campus, Limerick on Wednesday 12 May 2010, 10am-5pm.
The title of the seminar is taken from the book Espèces D’Espaces by Georges Perec, a leading figure of the OuLiPo literary movement that found creative freedom within the formal structures of language. Through the collection of observations on his surroundings and the topographical enumeration of their contents, he conveyed both the multiplicity of spatial relationships and the individual’s unique experience of spaces as a set of modular components. His systematic approach to writing evoked an acute awareness of the network of connections between people and things.
Species of Space comes at an opportune moment with OPEN/INVITED ev+a 2010 – Matters exhibiting at eleven venues throughout the city, the establishment of the Creative Limerick initiative, the imminent redevelopment of the Carnegie Building and the launch of the LCGA off-site programme. A panel of distinguished speakers will discuss ideas of space in contemporary artistic and curatorial practice, including Elizabeth Hatz (Professor of Architecture and curator of ev+a 2010 – Matters), Susan Hapgood (Director of Exhibitions at the Independent Curators International, New York), Dennis McNulty (visual artist, Dublin), James Voorhies (Director of Exhibitions at the Bureau for Open Culture, Columbus) and a panel of ev+a 2010 artists.
Image: documentation from flexible units/still, 2009, Dennis McNulty, courtesy of the artist and Green On Red Gallery, Dublin
About the speakers
Susan Hapgood is Director of Exhibitions at Independent Curators International (ICI) and a fellow of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, New York. Exhibitions and Web projects she has organized include Extension, FluxAttitudes, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958–62, and Video Divertimento. She has also written for journals including Frieze and Art in America . Her recent exhibition, Slightly Unbalanced, showed internationally-known artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Tony Oursler and Cindy Sherman, and travelled in the USA and Canada . It was an exhibition of works by artists who have focused on neurosis of various kinds in their work, using themselves and the people around them as fodder for their investigations.
Elizabeth Hatz is an architect holding an AA Diploma/ SAR/MSA and is Professor of Architecture at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm . She teaches also at SAUL School of Architecture, University of Limerick . As head of SAR (Swedish Association of Architects) from 1993-4, Hatz co-founded Fargfabriken, the internationally renowned scene for Art and Architecture in Stockholm and Östersund, in the north of Sweden . Her work was exhibited at Fargfabriken in 2004, at the Art&Science Festival in 2005 and at Lund Art Hall in 2006, with the AKAD event Beginnings. Performances include Dark Light – Architectural Wanderings, video performance at Lund City Hall at the Culture Night 1994 and at the symposium Form Follows Anything, Fargfabriken 1996. Hatz curated the exhibition The Dream Museum at the National Museum in Stockholm and designed the international exhibition Traces of Congo which toured the four Scandinavian capitals from the Etnographic Museum in Stockholm to the National Museum of Copenhagen 2002-2007. Her writings have been published in Sweden, UK and Ireland: for instance, Arkitektur, Tracings (Image of Interiority – Spatial Ambiguities, some reflections on space arising from the paintings of Wilhelm Hanmmershøi, 2003), Architecture Ireland 2008, 2009, des/Ire (Love Letter to the Island of Desire), Gandon Editions, Dublin 2008.
Dennis McNulty is an artist based in Dublin . His installation and sound performance work deals with the friction between the planned and the unplanned especially with respect to urban space. McNulty represented Ireland at the São Paulo Bienal in 2004 and returned in 2008 with the collaborative multidisciplinary project Weightless Days. He was awarded a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris in 2005. Recent shows include, Nothing is Impossible at The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2010), Tulca, Galway (2009), Compendium at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2009), The sound I'm looking for, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (October 2008), Encuentro de Medellin, Medellin, Colombia (April 2007), Landscape 08, The Dock, Carrick On Shannon (July 2008), Your position as much as your environment, Model Arts and Niland Galleries, Sligo,(March 2007). Solo shows include dx/dt at VOID (Derry, 2006) and framework/rupture at Green On Red, Dublin (February 2008), which was accompanied by the seminar AFTERTHOUGHTS. Curatorial projects include I think I remember at Temple Bar Gallery (2009), Underground, Dublin (June 2008), a collaboration with Peter Maybury and Volume at Temple Bar Galley & Studios (January 2009). He has also created soundtracks for the films Seaview (Still Films, 2008), Helen (Desperate Optimists, 2008) and Pyjama Girls (Still Films, 2010).
James Voorhies is Director of Bureau for Open Culture, a curatorial practice and exhibition-making programme for contemporary arts currently associated with Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio . Prior to that he was deputy director at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco . He has curated numerous exhibitions of international art, taught art history for Parsons The New School for Design, San Francisco Art Institute and worked in curatorial departments at the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Beginning fall 2010 he is visiting faculty at Bennington College in North Bennington, Vermont .
Panel of artists from OPEN/INVITED ev+a 2010 - Matters: Caoimhe Kilfeather, Marilyn Lennon, Peter Maybury and Myles Shelly www.eva.ie
Caoimhe Kilfeather, Night in the Science Zone, 2010
In making work I often use existing systems, objects or images as catalysts to generate alternative narratives or forms: a sort of relentless revisiting of the world's data. This enquiry stems from an interest in the normality of the world and the possibilities for its transformation. Notions of the time in which we identify and experience things is implicated in this enquiry; what is a foreseeable or attainable period of time and how do the cultural tropes of any period structure this experience and knowledge? These objects and images refresh our ability to perceive and consider. They appear in many ways familiar but have lost or gained a function, or have been reincarnated in some way.
Tom de Paor & Peter Maybury, Temperance, 2010
Made by Adrian and Errol Fowler of E. Fowler & Sons Ltd. Swords.
Nympholepsy is the ecstasy caused by the desire for the unobtainable. This nymphaeum is dedicated to the fountain nymph Arethusa, semi-divine and chaste attendant to the goddess Artemis. Arethusa bathed in the river Alpheus and was pursued persistently by the river god. Arethusa fled and prayed to Artemis, who disguised Arethusa as a cloud. Alpheus was persistent and Arethusa perspired as rain to become a stream which travelled underground to the island of Ortygeia . Alpheus’ waters flow through the sea uncontaminated to mingle with those of Arethusa.
Myles Shelly, Communication, 2009
We live in a fast-paced digitally connected world which has experienced an explosion in communications technology over the past decade. With this project I set out to document people interacting with various mobile communications devices, making photographs in locations where people would traditionally go to meet and socialise. While these technologies purport to bring us closer together and connect us, they can have the opposite effect.
Marilyn Lennon of SpiritStore (since 2009), Catherine Street Cultural Dig, 2010
The SpiritStore project, under the umbrella of ev+a, would like to expand to include new audiences and spaces in Limerick city. Building on a successful project at the Sarsfield Bar, which established a reputation and brand recognition for SpiritStore, we wish to move onto the streets. Social Practice engages some form of "the public" in collaboration, the receipt of services, or the activation of new situations. The Cat Dig weekend will begin on Friday 7 May at 5.30pm and finish at 5.30pm on Sunday 9 May. Ongoing details on this collaborative project can be accessed on the SpiritStore Facebook and blog as well as on a notice board outside French’s Cafe.
