Transference

TRANSFERENCE

Monster Truck Gallery, 4 Temple Bar, D. 2

& Broadstone Studios, 22 Harcourt Terrace, D. 2

5th August - 20th August 2011

Curated by Cliona Harmey & Cliodhna Shaffrey

Exhibiting Artists: Debora Ando; Lynda Devenney & Eleanor Duffin; Elaine Leader; Catriona Leahy; David Lunney; Anja Mahler; Colin Martin; Fiona McDonald; Séan O Sullivan; Alison Pilkington

Transference is an exhibition involving eleven artists whose practice originates in printmaking and who here move beyond the still print image with shifts into film, sculpture, video, painting and installation. The residue of the printmaking process remains present within the artists' methodologies. Elements connected to the craft of printmaking - layering, repetition, labour, separation, control, mark making, multiplicity and deconstruction - underscore these transferences. Conceived as the Black Church Print Studio Artists' annual exhibition, the artists selected this year demonstrate ambition in their expansion of the print medium, yet in their employment of different media and technology, the semblance or echo of their origins as printmakers is strongly carried through.

With undercurrent threads subtly hinting at the uncanny - mirroring; optical doubling; absence; unexpectedness; the cinematic and spatial estrangement - the works co-incidentally play further with this sense of rupture. Here, the mood shifts between the works - some quietly provocative, slow and restrained, others causing a jolt.

This exhibition is in two sites Monster Truck Gallery, 4 Temple Bar, Dublin 2 and Broadstone Studios, 22 Harcourt Terrace, Dublin 2

Exhibiting Artists: Monster Truck Gallery

Encountering art and the uncanny qualities of the reproduced image is explored in Alison Pilkington's site-specific installation A trace of the other including objects, paintings and print. In this installation, Pilkington draws on Walter Benjamin's text A Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction to create an atmosphere that has the potential to jolt the viewer from a state of complacency and to evoke an uncanny moment.

David Lunney's triptych, Deduction, can be viewed as a semi-sequential narrative that outlines various stages of a pre-meditated artistic process. The viewer, in questioning how the piece was conceived and made, is launched onto a chain of rational reasoning that culminates in an understanding of a lengthy and planned process. This process explores issues relating to digital art processes, global positioning software, printmaking, formalism, online self-promotion and the duality of material and digital forms. These issues are tackled within a self-contained visual unit.

Catriona Leahy explores themes of memory in terms of identity and spaces that reverberate a sense of the past. In her video work the handball alley is a site of socio-cultural significance and memory. It stands, insistently figurative, yet devoid of the figure. Its walls, not only evoke a sense of the auditory reverberations - of the ball from wall to hand - but also, echoes of events, which took place there.

Elaine Leader's architectural models and temporary experiential installations are psychologically disrupted in-between spaces, which are activated by the viewer and serve to access stages of mind connected with control. In the gallery an automatic garage door is installed, it is sensor activated and opens on the viewer entering the space. Strong, intense, glaring lights shine from within.

Séan O Sullivan specialises in discussions, editorial projects and printed material. His work, A Large Hole (Big enough to put a couch through), consists of a tall stack of A4 sized digital prints, placed in the gallery for public distribution. In its top left hand corner, the print signifies a set of implicit instructions for cutting. If these instructions are followed the audience member will produce a circular line of paper in an unwieldy tapered configuration.

Exhibiting Artists: Broadstone Studios

Colin Martin's films explore the relationship between cinema and space. The locations he chooses are bounded and idealised and serve to accommodate things that might not naturally exist together (museums, gardens, film studios). In his work The Bridge, two continuous steady cam shots of a temporary bridge form a two-channel film installation. There is a deliberate tension between real space and cinematic space and how space is represented in cinema. A point of departure for this work is the Deluezian term the Crystal Image, which refers to a cinematic image that combines the real and the actual within a cinematic image.

Lynda Devenney and Eleanor Duffin's collaborative work is an exploration of modern architecture and questions its current context during a time of social flux. The work responds to the materiality and structure of space, deconstructing and abstracting form in order to highlight the simplicity of shape and reference the fundamental structure. They impose colour and narrative to highlight the characteristics of site and act as an interference with its narrative. For this exhibition they have worked generatively with a set of modular forms, which encompass both video and sculptural elements.

Anja Mahler's work is concerned with seeing the invisible within the visible and by extension, locating the ambiguous space between the internal and external. In her video work, This earth might be uninhabited, she achieves effect through a process of withholding and distorting information, transforming domestic scenarios into landscapes of an extraterrestrial quality. The work alludes to the human conditions of depression and resignation, a condition that provokes desire for otherworldliness and transcendence.

Printmaking is the core Debora Ando's art making. Ando explores the representation through the analogy between degradation and decay in the urban environment and printmaking methods. For this exhibition she proposes the presentation rather than the representation of the matter of her subject; the dust gathered daily from the exhibition site, will be projected, using an overhead projector, to create a fictional cosmology.

Fiona McDonald's artworks consist of bespoke experimental apparatus - which meditate on the dynamics between art and science; man- made and ‘natural' systems; the technological and the ‘alive'. In this work a pulse width modulated electrical current transferred to a number of electromagnets cause crystalline lattices of ferromagnetic dust to expand and contract in regular mirroring movements. These accumulations and erosions of forms are suggestive of lunarscapes, eco-systems or crystal worlds.