The MA – Art in the Contemporary World graduate exhibition of Áine Macken and Oonagh O’Brien.

Opening hours,
Friday, 12pm – 8pm
Saturday, 10am – 6pm
6pm Saturday Film Screening ‘Sans Soleil’

Coming to completion of a dual purpose masters, combining that of theory and practice, Áine Macken and Oonagh O’Brien will present to you anamalgamation of the various brain activities with which they have become occupied over the past twelve months and reveal, for public view, a visual thesis. Held in the Digital Hub space, this show will interrogate aspects of visuality that of the persistence of vision within everyday life, and the absurd activities and imagery that keep ones mind occupied throughout the day.

The show’s title, taken from Jacques Ranciére’s “The Future of the Image”, relates to the movement beyond dialectical and symbolic modes of representation of montage in order to consider a more homogenous, or polemic as the case may be, approach to appropriation, mystery, conflict, in an effort to reveal the “seamless fabric of co-presence – the fabric that at once authorizes and erases all the seams; constructing the world of ‘images’ as a world of general co-belonging and inter-expression.” An investigation into the quality, materiality and classification of an image, this show will amaze you. Definitely. You should come.

Individual Information on each artist;

Oonagh O’Brien is currently a Kildare based artist. At present her work concentrates on looking at the moment when an image becomes a moving image. The basis for this lies in early visual experiments such as those by Eadweard Muybridge in the 19th century. It is interesting to note through these works, how such moving images walk the line between artwork and experiment. One of the most interesting terms to evolve from visual experiments of this period is the Persistence of Vision. O’Brien’s work focuses on the existence of such terminology and its place in current visual technologies. She is therefore working with strobe lighting, at night creating scenes reminiscent of early representational research. Therein lies an interest in trying to capture a later day movement with present day technology. Scenes and situations caused by working in such a way heighten awareness of the presence of the viewer as voyeur and roles become mixed with those of surveillance.

Áine Mackens mischievous and playful approach to image sourcing and making led her to this current body of work, which is an interrogation of Internet imagery. With the widespread creation of Internet personas through social networking websites, her work largely focuses on expression and emotion through image making, considering what it is that makes an image recognizable as an emotive expression. Working primarily with watercolour, she has pushed the media to consider both its failures as a medium, and that of the imagery from which it is sourced, leading to points of complete erasure for some of the resulting imagery. Juxtaposing images of people climaxing with those in grief, beauty queens being crowned with victims of atrocities, her aim is to question the nature of the painting as beautiful object, and to instigate thought of the fact that liquid can form to create a representation of an emotion.

Please contact
www.oonaghobrien.com
www.ainemacken.com
www.digitalhub.com