Behind Smoke & Mirrors Residency & Exhibition
Artist in Residence
Aideen BARRY
Aideen Barry is a Visual Artist, working in the mediums of performance, film, musical composition, drawings and animation. She recently was awarded funding from the Arts Council of Ireland’s Projects: New Work Award towards the creation of a new work filmed in Zero Gravity.
In September 2008 Barry took part in the collaboration project SOUND DESIGN FOR FUTURE FILMS, shown atAideen’s current work deals with the notion of the “Uncanny”, informed by recent diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder1. Her new work is sited in investigations into Hysterical behavior and the uncanny repetitive gesture or Tourette. With a play on perspective she creates films and performances based on investigations into optical illusions, endurance performance and the challenges presented to us in our everyday reality. Film and animation works reference the subverted female characters in texts from Irish literary figures such as Bram Stoker and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu aligned with theories of philosophers who are preoccupied with the notion of unnatural human behavior, playing with the blur between what is imagined and what is perceived to be; “the contemporary Gothic”. These issues are explored in a playful manner often using humour to entice the viewer. Her work oscillates between the intensely personal to the quotidian, often simultaneously, through use of the domestic re-arranged in an uncanny fashion. This interest in the search for the Gothic of the now has provoked interest into the evolution of the uncanny in a futuristic environment. For Aideen the contemporary gothic can be seen in everyday of Celtic Tiger Ireland. In the housing estates and shopping centers of stepford zombieness4 and now in the grip of hysterical post boom, recession
