MART Gallery & Studios – Providing Creative Platforms
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Wednesday 18th – Saturday 21st October 2017
MART LA – Pop Up Gallery, 6556 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028, USA
As part of Ireland Week Los Angeles 2017, Irish curator Matthew Nevin of The MART Gallery Dublin has curated RE:IN FORCE a pop up contemporary visual art exhibition showcasing established Irish Visual & Live Performance Artists. The exhibition focuses on artworks that comment on the relationship between the viewer and object. Often creating a visual abstraction, which highlights the process and creation of the artworks, the exhibition showcases a series of artworks that reinforce their self-contained narratives, aiming to shape and control their own presentation and perception by the viewer. Participating artists explore and reinvent common material, technologies and methodologies, resulting in works that provoke artistic limitations through experimental new work.
This Pop Up Exhibition runs as part of Ireland Week and is co produced by LACE. See Ireland Week sponsors at www.irelandweek.com/sponsors
Artists: Richard Forrest , James L Hayes , David Lunney, Katherine Nolan
ABOUT MART www.mart.ie
MART is an artist-led, not for profit arts organisation founded in 2007 by Matthew Nevin & Ciara Scanlan. With the help of a skilled team, our mission is to provide creative art studios and promote contemporary art through an engaging curatorial programme. Nevin & Scanlan have curated over 100 artists through previous exhibitions, events, festivals and art fairs across Ireland, UK, Europe, USA & Japan. In 2012 the pair embarked on a 16 month journey to transform the old Rathmines Fire Station, launching two galleries in 2013 as a new home for contemporary art in Ireland. MART primarily supports sculpture, video, new media, installation and performance, art making practices that break new ground, that test and stretch the material and immaterial, and challenge conventions of ‘the norm’. In 2016 MART had its biggest reach to date, as we signed on eight Artists to be represented by The MART Gallery in a first for the organisation. MART is the largest provider of independent, affordable studios and space for the arts, cultural and creative community in Dublin city. MART operate on a not for profit basis, meaning that all profits raised from studio rentals are in-invested back into our mission to develop and promote contemporary art. MART now support over 120 members in eight studio buildings across Dublin.
About Ireland Week www.irelandweek.com
Ireland Week is a week-long conference and culture festivities from Oct. 16-21, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. In association with Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The Irish Film Board, Culture Ireland, Creative Ireland, IDA Ireland, Tourism Ireland, Enterprise Ireland. Ireland Week’s focus is to bring Ireland to the world, and the world back to Ireland. The week will see varied and compelling events with a full and comprehensive program rolling out around Los Angeles, encompassing the myriad of cultural layers that make up Ireland, past, present, and future.
The Artists
Katherine Nolan http://www.katherinenolan.net/
An artist, lecturer and curator specialising in gender and new media. With particular focus on tensions between the experiential and the spectacular body, her research investigates gender, identity and desire in the context of digital cultures. Recent publications include The Camera and the Selfie: Narcissism, Self-Regulation and Feminist Performance Practices (DRHA, DCU 2015). She has exhibited internationally in Europe, America and Asia and regularly curates with MART and Dublin Live Art Festival. Her extensive teaching experience, includes a course leader role at the University of the Arts London and visiting lectureships at The National College ofArt and Design, Crawford College of Art and Design and Central Saint Martins, London. She is a member of Monster Truck Studios and the Society of Women in Philosophy in Ireland
Richard Forrest http://www.richardforrest.info/
Working across sculpture and installation, my practice is characterised by a spirit of studio experimentation and an analysis of human perception. In exploring our learned and visual understanding of form, material and space, I make physical artworks and installations which question simulacrum and authenticity. My research is heavily influenced by contemporary notions of representation. I am interested in re-negotiating our interaction with the world around us by using physical artworks that I have made – knowingly – in an age of technological and virtual acceleration. I seek to reimagine the internet, and the information it carries, as a sculptural organism. In my most recent installations, I have created speculative scenes, whereby exotic structures have seemingly travelled through an otherworldly vortex into the exhibition space, carrying physical fragments from a virtual environment.
James L Hayes http://www.jameslhayes.ie/
James L Hayes is an Irish contemporary visual artist whose current work and research practice reinvests a modernist sculptural language. Recent projects use methods of artistic production as a means by which to interrogate the boundaries between artist, artisan and art object in order to draw out the often-incongruous relationships between finished art objects, and the industrial aspects of the processes that produce these revered objects. This research-based practice has an art historical agenda, referencing key creative influences such as the celebrated Welsh artist Barry Flanagan. Broader research interests range from contemporary interpretations of sculptural legacies, to site-specific interventionist works that draw from traces of significant pasts and histories.
David Lunney http://davidlunney.com/
Lunney’s artistic practice involves the undertaking of protracted art processes. Typically, these processes start with the construction of site-specific sculptural works in Dublin Mountains. These sculptures are generally created less for their inherent value but rather to provide photographic source material for documentary artworks. The resulting documentary artworks can take the form of prints, drawings or photographs. These images are rendered, framed and presented in a fashion which intentionally obscures and embellishes the original object and moment that they represent. In these artworks, it is often the relationship between representational imagery and it’s surrounding abstract visual information which infers the process and concept behind the work. The works have a self-contained narrative; the concept and the material process are intrinsically linked in the artworks discussion of it’s provenance.
