MART Gallery & Studios – Providing Creative Platforms
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DAC Gallery, Los Angeles
Sofie Loscher, Jonathan Mayhew, Margaret O’Brien, Gearoid O’Dea
April 2016
‘Activating Pangea’ is three-year series of exhibitions curated by MART {Dublin}, who will work with targeted Los Angeles based galleries and art fairs, to strategically promote leading Irish Contemporary Visual Artists.
This first exhibition in the series seeks to activate Pangea, an imagining of our pre-human world without borders, without physical and cultural barriers that prevent new ways of being and thinking. ‘Activating Pangea’ will showcase artwork reflecting on geopolitics and how we understand our own identity and culture over time and space, as we transverse and negotiate real and imagined places in a global context. Artists create imagined spaces and show us a world that can never exist, it is their role to present reality through a twisted and subverted looking-glass. Imagined places can exaggerate and distort reality; the experience of being in places we have pre-conceived seems to force a new reality upon us.
Globalisation, and increased movement and communication across place and national borders, has created both a crisis and a critical rethinking of cultural identity. And yet recent anxieties emerging in the context of an immigration crisis in europe and the middle east, have seen the tightening of national boundaries. The exhibition series will see artists produce work that reflects on how diaspora and migration, the movement of people and cultures across space, has the ability to question fixed ideas of identity.
Though genetic codes and their cultural inscriptions each person takes their ‘brand’ wherever they go. And yet our experiences of our own identity as we age over time, can make it problematic to hold on to a persistent identity; our understanding of a unique set of characteristics, qualities and features that make us who we are. In particular they will reflect on experiences of Irish Cultural Identity and Diaspora.
Generously Supported by Culture Ireland
