What’s On | Art Events in April
Looking for something inspiring to do this month? Check out these Art Events in April, taking place around the country this month!
Exhibitions:
Living Inside: Six Voices from the History of Irish Prison Reform
Living Inside is a new free exhibition at Kilmainham Gaol Museum about change and continuity, institutions and ideas, pain and protest, in Irish prisons. It tells the stories of six people whose experiences speak to the history of Irish prison reform, from prisoners’ protests against unhealthy living conditions to the psychological strain faced by prison officers.
Drawing on research by Oisín Wall (University College Dublin) on the history of prison reform organisations and activists in 1970s and 1980s Ireland, it includes the evocative images by photojournalist Derek Speirs, historical objects from the rich and remarkable collections of the Mountjoy Prison Museum and other illuminating artefacts from archives across Ireland.
The exhibition continues through April until May 18th. Admission is free.
Efference Copy Mechanism
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios is pleased to present Efference Copy Mechanism, a large-scale installation by Ronan McCrea. The exhibition comprises a complex arrangement of superimposed slide and 16 mm film projections that draw on the artist’s personal archive and accumulated image bank, continuing his ongoing exploration of celluloid materiality, appropriated and found images, instructional film and pedagogy, reproduction and indexicality.
The darkened gallery space is divided by a line of steel archive storage shelves. From within this structure an array of signals, control boxes, cables, looping mechanisms and projectors orchestrate the combination of images onto the surrounding walls. Efference Copy Mechanism acts as a metaphor and framework for the artist’s thinking on his own relationship to the photo-mechanical image and the ‘baggage’ – both physical and metaphoric – of a personal archive representing many years of practice.
The exhibition closes on April 13th. Admission is free.
A Weight of Windows
A Weight of Windows is an installation of fleeting urban forms by artist, Aideen Farrell. This exhibition examines temporary and makeshift ways of claiming space. It attempts to fossilise these forms and examine the artist’s own urge to build, arrange and demarcate spaces.
Farrell’s practice examines her role in creating these orchestrated spaces and explores the scale at which we can control our environments. She explores the acts of building, claiming and dividing spaces through filming her studio practices and she investigates the private made public and spatial through this work. She uses a combination of found materials, wood, metal, wire, plaster casts, drawing, and photography to create temporary, navigable installations. These respond to their location and layer existing, imagined, and planned spaces.
The exhibition runs from the 4th to the 20th of April at the Pallas Projects/Studios. Admission is free.
Damien Hirst – At Play
Gormleys Fine Art, Dublin are delighted to announce an exhibition of works by internationally acclaimed artist Damien Hirst. The exhibition titled “At Play” will open on Thursday 4th April 2019 at 6.30pm and will run until the 25th April at 27 South Frederick Street, Dublin 2. The show will feature a selection of original prints by Hirst created between 2005 and the present day.
Damien Hirst first came to public attention in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated “Freeze,” an exhibition in a disused warehouse that showed his work and that of his friends and fellow students at Goldsmiths College. In the nearly quarter of a century since that pivotal show (which would come to define the Young British Artists), Hirst has become one of the most influential artists of his generation. Admission is free.
An Altered Land
An Altered land is an exhibition of recent works by artist David Fox, showcasing a selection of the artist’s current painting practice. This exhibition comprises a series of subdued landscapes demonstrating how man-made constructs have left an indelible mark on our natural world. The artist seeks to push further the notion of human construction, by focusing our attention on these fabricated objects or structures that tend to cut through the land and ‘obstruct the natural world’.
Throughout his painting practice, Fox documents enticing scenes as witnessed first-hand during his day to day activities. We gain insight to his ‘everyday’ lifestyle, as settings depict the current surroundings of both his professional life and leisure time. In An Altered Land, a sense of place being most predominant – we witness scenes of empty motorways, countryside roads, rural landscapes and other various works of topography. These mundane and ‘everyday’ landscapes have a stark emptiness that work to create an uncanny representation of the chosen spaces. Each specific painting holds a personal narrative and at the very core, it is a documentation of the artists daily life.
The exhibition is on show at the Olivier Cornet Gallery from April 14th to May 12th. Admission is free.
slow motion
slow motion is a presentation of new works by Jane Fogarty. The works are an exploration of time, form, colour and composition.
Within her work, Fogarty establishes limitations from which self-dictated narratives emerge. Through these boundaries, elements of chance and endurance enter into the work. Each work is specific to the moment of its creation and, even if repeated, results differ each time. These works stem from an interest in the ways we understand the passing of time and its translation into visual language. Analogous to time, a painting can be interpreted as an accumulation of moments.
The work is slow and contemplative in its creation due to the nature of the processes involved. The process is cyclical. The paintings inform the sculptural works and the sculptural works inform the paintings. Everything is connected.
The exhibition continues to the 25th of April at the MART Gallery. Admission is free.
Our Plundered Planet
The Hugh Lane Gallery is pleased to present Our Plundered Planet by American artist Mark Dion.
Our Plundered Planet offers commentary on human treatment of the natural environment, tempered with a dose of humour and playfulness. At a time when greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are at historically high levels and the polar glaciers are melting, Dion’s work poses the question of human responsibility – What is the relationship between human beings and our biospheres? Cultural and Capital ecologies—these are the systems Mark Dion observes as intrinsically linked and interactive.
The exhibition opens on April 4th and will run until the 1st of September. Admission is free.
Periphery
Burren College of Art is pleased to host the MFA Exhibition, Periphery, along with the Study Abroad undergraduate end-of-year exhibition and postgraduate Open Studios.
Works will be exhibited by graduating year MFA students Perrin Duncan, Katie Kramer, Morgan Madison and Kaitlynn Webster.
In Periphery, the Burren College of Art’s 2019 Master of Fine Arts graduates will exhibit notions of the natural environment, time, meditation, and the collective. This diverse exhibition offers a culmination of two years of these students’ work, created on the periphery of the Burren.
The exhibition will run from April 13th to April 26th. Admission is free.
Events:
The Dublin Comic Arts Festival
The Dublin Comic Arts Festival is an ongoing series of quarterly small press comic book events in Dublin and was created to showcase local comic creators and celebrate the spectrum of Irish sequential art. Peruse comics & art by talented exhibitors, bring your used comics to participate in a communal comic swap, and engage in a variety of drawing activities running throughout the day.
Their next event will take place on the 6th of April from 11-6 am at The Chocolate Factory on King’s Inn Street. Admission is free.
