Repetition

Group Show curated by Magaret O’Brian with Niamh Ann Kelly

Artists: Amanda Jane Graham, Anja Mahler, Anthony Lyttle, Debora Ando, Denise Hawrysio, Esther Breslin, Fiona Reilly, Janine Davidson, John Graham, Jonathan Ross, Jessica Conway, Lorraine Neeson, Tracy Staunton, Siobhan Tattan, Seamus McCormack, Michael Fitzgerald, Louise Peat

Gallery: Cross Gallery and Monstertruck Gallery, Dublin

Repetition sets up expectations and baffles them at both regular and irregular intervals. It draws attention, not to the object (word, image or sound), but to what lies between them.[i]

The exhibition Repetition brings together the diverse practice of seventeen contemporary artists, working across a range of media, including video, installation, performance, drawing, print and sculpture. Deployed as a motif, a theme, a technique, a mechanism or a function of communication, aspects of repetition establish each of the artworks in this exhibition, offering a momentary instance of connection within a diversity of art forms.

Repetition has long been a device within art practice from serial painting in the 18th century and vast multiple bronze casts in the 19th century, to multiples within modern art and the practice of appropriation in the postmodern era. Repetition as concept and form addresses complex relationships between the origin, the original and its repeat - the necessity of repetition to engender the myth of the original. Recognised as key mechanisms within postmodern art practice, writer Maria Loh identifies repetition as seriality and repetition, appropriation, intertextuality, and simulation practice.[ii] Others describe this plurality of practices under the general term of the "allegorical impulse", suggesting that postmodern artists repeat, serialize, appropriate and simulate, '"not to restore an original meaning that may have been lost or obscured" but instead to add, replace, supplant, and supplement one meaning with another.' [iii] In considering repetition as a construct of visual language, the works exhibited explore the semiotic potency of the 'space' or absence in between each repetition. Toni Morrison states that invisible things are not necessarily 'not-there', that a void is not always a vacuum, and that certain absences are so stressed, that they call attention to themselves and 'arrest us with intentionality and purpose.'[iv] The exhibition is installed across two Dublin city-centre venues - Monster Truck Gallery, Temple Bar and Cross Gallery, Francis Street - conjoining two spaces in a temporary project that endeavours to expose repetition as an autonomous language of postmodern art practice. Repetition will be accompanied by A&E, a discursive event free and open to the public, on Monday 21st January 2013 at 7pm, Monster Truck Gallery. The event and exhibition are both initiatives of the Black Church Print Studio off-site programme 2013. Margaret O'Brien is an artist, and lecturer in fine art at National College of Art & Design, Dublin and Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork. She completed MFA at Slade School of Art, London and BA at Limerick School of Art. O'Brien exhibits internationally and has won numerous awards for her work. She is currently undertaking PhD at Trinity College Dublin and is represented by nag gallery, Dublin. Niamh Ann Kelly is a lecturer in Critical Theory at the School of Art Design and Printing, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland and is Programme Chair of the BA in Visual and Critical Studies. She is also a freelance art writer and researcher and has delivered workshops and lectures at art and heritage venues and has curated public art projects and events.