Official opening on Saturday 11th January at 4 pm
Robert Dunne's work is mainly about growing up in a small mining village in north Kilkenny. It explores issues about identity and the uncertainty which comes with it. Robert’s work incorporates drawing, painting and sculpture. The starting point is always drawing, and this involves layering and then taking elements away; work is exposed and layered again, the ideas which emerge from these drawings can sometimes be developed into other media.
Robert has created a site specific piece especially for this show, the piece involved working with schools kids from Kilkenny and Ennistymon, to create brown paper bag houses, which will be on show en masse, and this piece is about hiding and exposing parts of one’s identity.
Robert Dunne was educated in the USA and Ireland. Since the 1990s he has been exhibiting in a number of group- and solo shows.
Cormac O’Neill is a painter. His painting is intuitive and expressive. It is a restless engagement with coherence. The work maintains a record of its own history as a series of tentative sallies and failures towards an intuition or idea.
The works combine abstract marks, text and at times mechanically reproduced images. These images reflect sometimes on the bombardment of images and the difficulty of objective history. Sometimes they reflect on the fact of these images in their banality and ubiquity. The text is used to amplify the echo of some of the difficulties we meet in our contemporary encounters with the symbolic.
Inspired by Eastern and Western philosophical thought and poetry Cormac makes images which draw from our current presence in the world and resonate with the universal.
The show runs until February 1st
IN THE RED COUCH SPACE
'Who Am I?' – a series of self-portrait paintings by Kris T. Verenga
Official opening on Saturday 11th January at 4 pm with Anu Day
The question 'Who Am I' is a provocative one and a question that the artist has been addressing as a life pursuit. It is first a spiritual question of origin, looking at the source of consciousness, ego, and self. And secondly it has been a question for the artists' work. How does this get expressed through painting and creativity
Kris T. Verenga says about the process: “The investigation of 'Self', manifesting as a series of 'Self'-portraits began the winter of 2011. At first it was a distraction from bleak days and nights and then became a tool for the 'outsider' to go deeper into the vessel of the human form as a philosophical search and as a practice for fine tuning the eye, and refining drawing and compositional skills. It began to read as a storyboard of characters reflected through still images, a Dickensian winter
She continues: “I began by setting up scenes and placing her form on the set, photographing the moment using tripod and remote. The process began as a candid look, no artificial distractions like expectations of beauty or lack there of.
One begins to look with detachment at the form, without judgement. This in itself delivers an emotional adjustment of acceptance. The process evolved from strictly straight forward 'seeing' to a more elaborate development which illustrated mental constructs, visual turns, narrative twists and bent images.
Approaching year two of this examination, the portrait settles, there is less literal interpretation, the images disperse into emptier space and drift into abstraction”.
For more information: http://www.kristyverenga.com
