MART Gallery & Studios – Providing Creative Platforms
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27 October – 17 November 2018
Hangar Galleries, Santa Monica Art Studios, 3026 Airport Ave, Santa Monica, California
Curated by Matthew Nevin & Deirdre Morrissey.
MART Gallery & Studios Dublin curators Matthew Nevin & Deirdre Morrissey are delighted to present Transmission an exhibition featuring Irish Artists Sofie Loscher, Helen Mac Mahon & Robin Price in the Hangar Galleries, Los Angeles as part of Irelandweek 2018. Within their work, the artists examine and reinvent light as a material, producing experimental methodologies to act as a mirror and analysis of the structure of our world.
Featuring Live Performances and readings from local artists & performers on the opening night; including Zeina Baltagi, Jenny Minniti Shippey, Thinh Nguyen, Marc-Ivan O’Gorman, Rachel Rath, and Patrice Roth.
Transmission explores light as catalyst to investigate the risks in our everyday life. By creating dialogues which challenge conventional views, the exhibition aims to push preconceived expectations of how visibility works and is understood. The exhibition surveys the processes of how light moves through space, exploring both its and our expectations of its functions. The way that light moves through space can often bring forward new possibilities in presentation and representation, igniting exploration through visibility and quite often producing overlooked qualities. The works explore visibility, the process of perception, expectations versus function and assesses how our beliefs or understanding of light can be changed or manipulated through positioning, alignment and juxtaposition.
The artwork explores light in its most basic form and the processes behind visibility. The installations redirect the viewer’s attention away from the object and towards the process of perception. The work uses unconventional sculptural media with a scientific underpinning. It makes connections between the physical world and the visual world, examining issues of visibility, stability, perception and contradiction. Her polarised geometric sculptures and cyanotype prints examine how light moves through space, through objects and to picture how we move in relation to it – these optical devices and materials reveal a way to better understand light. The works expose how we see refracted and redirected light, and how a change in direction might affect our perception.
“The work created for Transmission explores materials, our expectations around their function and how these beliefs might be confounded. Everyday materials are used, in particular those that seem fixed and certain, such as concrete and glass. These materials make manifest the external structure of our world and serve to reflect this world back to us. But, through simple manipulations, be it the introduction of an additional element or the presentation of an object en masse, new potentials for the materials are created. Bringing to light previously overlooked qualities and revealing new possibilities, the potential to see beyond limitations and restrictions associated with certain materials is focused on while also emphasising active discernment rather than blind trust in their more traditional functions.”
The works in this exhibition make visible the outcomes of a collaboration between digital artist Robin Price and environmental scientist Francis Pope. Experimental photography – recorded using a custom-built digital light painter and wearable sensors – capture the extent of air pollution present by enlarging microscopic particulates which are usually invisible to the naked eye. Images which indicate a greater density depict higher numbers of hazardous particulates. These images were made in sites around the UK and Ireland, as well as those which are most vulnerable to the health effects of pollution including India, Mexico and East Africa.
With thanks to Culture Ireland, Ciara Scanlan & Team at The MART Gallery Dublin, Santa Monica Art Studios and Deirdre & Buzz O’Neill of Irelandweek 2018.
