LCGA Exhibitions

Of the 36 artists selected by the Curators Angelika Nollert & Yilmaz Dziewior, 20 artists will exhibit their work in Limerick City Gallery of Art, ranging from drawing, film works, sculptural installations, photographs and text pieces.

Willie DOHERTY
(1959, N.Ireland)
Three Potential Endings
Video Installation 11:00, 2009
Galerie Peter Kilchmann
Three Potential Endings was shot on location in Dublin during the summer of 2008.  The work presents a male figure besieged with the possibility of failure and uncertainty. It does not provide any explanation or rationale, but rather places the man in direct confrontation with the architectural spaces where he finds himself. The three sequences are simultaneously fragmented and connected by a fourth sequence that shows the man pacing around a small, confined space. It is unclear whether he is lost in thought and deep in concentration or whether he is confused and oblivious to his surroundings.

Andrea FACIU
(1977, Romania/Germany)
Touching the City No 1, Touching the City No 3
Duel Video Installation 13:25, 09:50, 2008, 2009
How does it feel, touching a city, an urban conglomerate? A city is built out of structures and the vivid relationships that exist between them. The aim of the project is experiencing the cities and the inner lives of the people living in them and dirtying one's own hands with the dust of civilisation. Touching the City as an urban portrait is a work in progress and has been applied already to the city of Iasi in Romania .

Andreas FOGARASI
(1977, Austria)
Cities
Text Panels, 2008
Cities are often introduced with historicizing references, “The Art City”, “The City of Light”, or, “The Sport City”. These attributes are less descriptions than constructions that are meant to take on an identity-forging function. These distinctions are intended to promise gains in the competition between cities. They appeal to residents, tourists and investors alike. In his works Fogarasi addresses different aspects of city marketing strategies in order to undermine them.

William HAMILTON
(1975, Ireland)
Closed for Ever
Photograph, 2008
Ireland's  so called ‘Celtic Tiger’ was branded as something positive and necessary for the country. In times of mass development and globalization, Irelands Public spaces have diminished, and with it our sense of community. ‘Closed forever’ asks us to remember what we have lost.

Michele HORRIGAN
(1978, Ireland)
Nature Obscured by Factory / Factory Obscured by Fog
Video Installation, Projection 04:54, Flat screen 29:55, 2007
In Nature Obscured by Factory/Factory Obscured by Fog, environmental concerns surrounding an industrial factory close to Horrigan’s locale of Askeaton are investigated. Aughinish Alumina was established beside the Shannon Estuary in 1983 and produces 1.8 million tonnes of aluminium yearly, making it the largest factory of its kind in Europe. Horrigan uses extracts from newspapers and media reports, displayed chronologically on a television monitor, to narrate the debate surrounding deformed agricultural livestock, toxic deposits in the soil and harmful sulphur emissions.

Luis JACOB
(1971, Peru/Canada)
The Album VII
Collage Series, 2009
The Album VII, consists of images from various books, magazines, and other publications, montaged together within plastic laminate panels to form an “image bank”. Through a process of visual association, the images of Album VII compose an extended, even epic narrative bringing together various themes: the built environment, standardization, and the symbolic space of artistic production; architectural interiors and urban design; acts of construction and destruction;  Another main topic of Album VII is the idea of mapping urban space.

Jakob KOLDING
(1971, Denmark/Germany)
Untitled, Untitled
Poster Stack, 2000, 2009
Dr.Susanne Noethen. The work of Jakob Kolding deals with different aspects of space and place, especially in urban and suburban contexts. His collage from 2000 depicts a high rise building which seems to be beautified by the inhabitants or the architects by applying different colour fields on the otherwise monotone façade. The text on his poster can be read as a comment on this, as urban planning and local initiatives define public space and its use. At the same time by presenting the posters in a grid and as a stack he refers to Minimalism.

Sean LYNCH
(1978, Ireland )
Peregrine Falcons Visit Moyross
Video Installation 3:00, 2008
Sean Lynch’s artworks frequently investigate the narratives of architecture and its everyday realities. Peregrine falcons, the fastest creatures in the world, were once populous around the west of Ireland , before the use of pesticides in the 1960s made them an endangered species. In March 2008 three falcons were introduced to the Moyross area, with miniature video cameras attached to their bodies. Moyross was developed between 1973 and 1987 on the edge of the city, comprising of 1,160 houses, divided into 12 parks. Although the population has decreased in recent years, it still stands in excess of 4,000 people, 50% of which are under the age of 24. Employment stands at 21%. Recently Limerick City Council announced their vision for the area, intending to demolish the entire estate and rebuild it on a smaller scale. The falcons’ free flights over the troubled estate record a place about to disappear under the failed agendas of urban planning.

Vukasin NEDELJKOVIC
(1975, Serbia/Ireland)
Asylum Seekers
Video Installation 04:00, 2008
Asylum Seekers video project consists of nine different videos about the life of asylum seekers in Ballyhaunis, Co. Mayo, Ireland. The individuals are talking about their personal backgrounds, their culture, their situation in the hostel and integrating into Irish society. People from Nigeria, Afghanistan, Serbia, Ethiopia, Iran, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Pakistan and Eritrea took part in the project. The title of each video is the name of the person interviewed, followed by the personal reference number that has been given to every asylum seeker. As an asylum seeker myself, I find that we are living in a ghetto, an open prison far from the rest of society, without any possibilities to integrate into broader Irish society.

Isabella OBERLÄNDER
(1986, Austria/Ireland)
CG_08
Video Installation 04:00, 0:20, 2009
Is there a common, socially generated habit in the human perception of art? Who do humans recognize as a group? How do humans differentiate between a group and an individual? I have been examining the structure of a group in dance and live performance, contrasting the isolation of a single person (“solo”) in comparison to a group (“corps de ballet”) in historical ballet productions and in commercial pop production. This difference is artificially exaggerated through daily repeated habit, which has the effect of limiting the possibilities of human perception. Solo performance on Saturday May 16th at 8.30pm at Daghdha, John’s Square, Limerick.

Eoin O'CONAILL
(1979, Ireland)
Common Place 2008
Photographic Series 2008
The collection of landscape and portrait images explores the idea of modern Ireland by focusing on public space and the relationship between people and the Irish landscape. Studying the everyday landscape, this work isolates a synthesis of our common vernacular, by including images of the streets, buildings, houses, landscapes and people. Photographed at different times of the day and under different weather conditions these images create a narrative reflecting the reality of our common experience. The work highlights the visual contradictions embedded in the present, the buildings waiting to be transformed, the land newly concreted and the changing composition and attitude of the population. The optimism and base reality of human existence are witnessed, as a people survive, possibly strive and generally get by. The use of light within the work, captured in the early morning or the late evening, reflects and responds to Ireland in transition between what is vanishing and what is newly emerging.

Siobhan OGILVY
(1972, Ireland)
Still Waters
Photographic Series 2008
The series Still Waters was a photographic project on the Royal Canal in Dublin and its environs. This explored the interface where the countryside delved deeply into the inner city along the length of the water, and urban development stretched out into the country. The canal resists the encroaching development and thus maintains an uneasy marriage of the rural and the urban.

David O'KANE
(1985, Ireland)
Palabras
Video Projection 18:28, 2008
The dialogue is composed entirely of quotations from the work of Jorge Luis Borges and the narrative is primarily based on two short stories detailing Borges’ encounter with his double or doppelganger: ‘The Other’ and ‘August 25 1983’.  An Actor plays the character of Jorge Luis Borges and his ‘Double’.

John O'REILLY
(1976, Ireland)
The Flats by the River, Dolphins Barn
Oil on Canvas, 2008
These night time cityscapes from Dublin feature Council Flats and a dark orange lit sky. They display warm light and colour from areas regarded as hard and cold. Their cultural and architectural value is usually ignored. These areas changed dramatically over time and have immense atmosphere and history.

Gavin REDMOND
(1982, Ireland )
Air. Light. Matter
Wall Text, 2009
The piece relates directly to engaging with Limerick as a city and in a wider sense to the urban experience in general. The artist spent the day – following Guy Debord’s idea of derivé – walking in and reporting on the city with a notebook. He attempted to create a subjective mapping of the city and its psycho geographical impact by collecting empirical style evidence. He noted the physicality of the place, the direction and rhythm of the streets and eavesdropped for sound-bites. This was edited and condensed into a block of text and painted directly onto the wall.

Tom RYAN
(1960, Ireland)
Poppies and the device of fragmentation, Inch
Drawing Series, 2008, 2009
This project researches the landscape topography of the Limerick region, in particular the view from one of the hills at Knockroe (Mason), a vantage point used by King William of Orange setting up for the Siege of Limerick in 1690. Extensive remains of the buildings can be seen spread across a 500 metre terrace, designed to glean ore and provide protection. From this point the district site of Boher can be surveyed, an important thoroughfare for two to three millennia. In contrast to the hill at Knockrow, Inch opposite is a deep valley over 800 metres by 350 metres across and 100 metres deep with a flooded slot of 30 metres in the base. This hole may have appeared when 640,000 homes were built, together with extensive new road structures. A ring of hills including Knockroe (Mason), one between Luddenmore and Inch, and others over Lough Gur all show extensive signs of continuous human habitation. These landscapes retain a wealth of archaeology and traces of earlier inhabitants’ relationship to the region.

Nicole SIX / Paul PETRITSCH
(1971, 1968, Austria)
Spacial Intervention (2)
Video Installation 47:00, 2003
The Austrian artist duo explores and measures the world around them with the aid of concrete experiments. Over the years their test arrangements, which at times border on the absurd have led to an archive of poetic parables on man’s exposure to uncertainties within space. This archive is concerned with the testing of limits and possibly the overcoming of limitations: with confronting the fear of falling, with not trying to escape when the ground disappears beneath one, with throwing oneself into the wind, with fighting fatigue, but also simply and radically with dismissing established parameters such as gravity as a law of nature. In summary, the artists put to test the experience of the security of space and in the process disconcert the body itself on an existential level.

An Te LIU
(1967, Canada )
Cloud
Air Purifier and Ioniser Installation, 2009
Cloud is comprised of domestic air purification appliances, produced and consumed around the world over the last decade. They cleanse, filter, ionize and sterilize our airspace, separating us from bacteria, allergens, germs, spores, dust and other dangerous contaminants. Armada-like clusters converge to create a floating city, perhaps of the future, but also recalling visions of future-past. In the early twentieth century, ideas about cleanliness and healthy living were influential in the development of modern architecture and urbanism. They were connected to the call for sunlight, greenery, fresh air and spacious expanses free of congestion. The rhetoric of hygiene would resonate psychologically and translate visually in the creation of new, pure forms.

Stefanos TSIVOPOULOS
(1973, Greece)
Untitled (The Remake)
Video Installation 13:00, 2007
On Untitled (The Remake), Tsivopoulos turns to archival material from the years of the 1967 dictatorship and the early years of Greek State Television. He organised the artwork on three levels: On the first level he used material from the official celebrations of the Colonels and festivities in the Athens Marble Stadium. On a second level he shot the technical equipment then used in the Hellenic Radio television (ERT) studios for the production of news bulletins. Finally, on a third level he elaborated on some sequences that had been saved from the rehearsals of news bulletin broadcasters of the period and staged a precise appropriation with the use of actors. Such a triple structure attributes multiple meanings to the title: Remake.  It is a rethinking on the possibility of the reconstruction of reality and the fundamental role technique plays in this process. It is also a comment on the propaganda mechanisms of the regime and the reversal of associations from the supposedly existing materials.

Olaf UNVERZART
(1972, Germany )
Ein Dünnes Kind im Wind (A skinny child in the wind)
Photographic Series, 2007-2009
The series of photographs Ein dünnes Kind im Wind (a skinny child in the wind), deals with familiar subjects which are places and architecture at the same time. Influenced by authors like Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain the artist travelled around the world, looking for temporary architecture which has a further purpose of shelter. This range of humble huts shows a worldwide phenomenon.