'Dolphin Address' by JAN PLOEG

Photography and Video exhibition

Launch 19th June at 8pm - exhibition runs until July 12th
The official opening takes place on the 19th June by Dr. Simon Berrow, founder of the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group and Project officer of the Shannon Dolphin and Wildlife Foundation
The exhibition of the Dutch sculptor and photography artist Jan Ploeg shows 26 large mounted photographs of the dolphin Dusty, taken just under the waters' surface, where the sunlight is still strong, making her appear as being clad in a golden shroud. In addition, three computers will be set up where visitors will be able to view hundreds of photographs and underwater videos or logon to the artist's website www.janploeg.nl

What makes Jan's work so unique is his passion and dedication to nature, the sea and dolphins in particular. During his first visit to Ireland in 1992, he started to swim with 'Fungi the Dolphin' and later in 2002 with 'Dusty'. In order to understand and sculpt these wonderful animals better, he developed 'WaterWing', which he is still using to swim with the dolphin.
It can best be described as a fusion of the pectoral fins, which are tilted into an up and down movement in which the water is pushed backwards. This 'WaterWing', as well as Jan's swimming gear and monofin will be shown at the launch of the exhibition.

In his own words, Jan describes his work as follows: "As a sculptor I am interested in matching properties of wood, like the shape, colour or grain with an image from Nature. The image, whether in three-dimensional wood, in expressive language or in visual capture is my major inspiration". He goes on to say: "I always start from reality, attempt to share its beauty, explore its manifestations or demonstrate hidden dimensions. I like to coin this approach 'Poetic Reality' as an encouraging counterpart to the harshness generally ascribed to it".

Jan made three books: 'Dolphin Address', 'Dusty' and 'Waterscapes'. These books and the photographs in A4 format by on-the-spot printing will be on sale in the Gallery during the exhibition.In addition, he has made a DVD, named 'Dolphin Address' containing underwater videos, an anthology of the 'Dolphin Address' website articles, a 30 chapter story about his teenage adventure and more short stories will be available as well.

Examples and details of his work can be found on www.janploeg.nl

'Impressions of Place' by ROBIN GRACE

Photography Launch 19th June at 8 pm exhibition runs until 25th July

This exhibition documents the many people and places Robin has encountered throughout the World, looking at countries such as Mongolia, China, India and Uganda. 'Impressions of Place' tells the story of people and how they live, their culture and spirituality.
His affinity for documentary led him to work for press agencies in both Limerick and London. Robin is now based in Dublin, working as a freelance photographer.
Born in Ireland, he studied Photography and Digital Imaging at Reading College and School of Art and Design.

Art Exhibition by the 2009 FETAC students, Ennistymon Vocational School

June 5th at 8pm
Officially opened by George O'Callaghan



The exhibition runs until June 12th

The students are studying Art FETAC level 5 course. This year the students have covered various disciplines including Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Photography, Ceramics, Combined Materials, Printmaking, Printed Textiles, Work Experience and Communications.
The course draws applicants from a wide variety of backgrounds, ages and educational experience. This lively mixture of people benefits staff and students and promotes a positive open-minded environment for learning to take place. The art produced is reflective of this diversity.
info on the FETAC level 5 Art course 2009/2010 please contact Bairbre Geraghty on 087 6595250

NEEDS Life Performance by Fergus Cronin

16th May at 6pm

Launch of exhibition and Life Performance by Fergus Cronin

Fergus Cronin, is a performance artist, who uses his body as a platform, with a tendency towards making a public show of himself; his street interventions are simple and powerful and mostly involve holding A4 signs in public spaces. The signs, such as 'I need attention' and 'I need touch', express a vulnerability he chooses to reveal on that day, to communicate ideas and get people to ask questions of him and about themselves. His work seeks to explore the nature and connecting qualities of basic human needs.

"Inside out - outside in"

Niall McCormack

May 6th - May 30th
Launch 16th May - 6 pm
paintings and installation



Superficially, Niall McCormack's recent work deals in a familiar visual currency of the most tangible feature of the now-fading Celtic Tiger years: the burgeoning property market and the proliferation of housing 'units' that has become a ubiquitous subtext to the contemporary Irish landscape. McCormack, it seems is presenting as an appositely familiar artistic metaphor.
His meticulously rendered structures evoke architectural accuracy, and are effected with painstaking attention to detail. And yet these uniformly windowed housing units and agglomerations lack doors or chimneys - features that would render the structures practical and habitable. Thus the buildings enter the realm of the surreal, ciphers that reflect the artist's own concerns.
The faceless uniformity of McCormack's houses creates a sense of disquiet and foreboding, of soullessness. It speaks of isolation and the contradictions of living together but being apart - a house not as the cliched home but rather as an instrument of separation, of incarceration, even. The long, hard shadows cast hint at the melancholic urban landscapes of de Chirico or Sironi. The houses are located within an amorphous landscape
of contours and horizons devoid of many features that would impart a sense of authentic, gritty reality: even the silhouettes of Croagh Patrick and Clew Bay (the geography of the artist's own experience) exist as schematic notes: context uncontextualised.
The buildings are cold and precisely delineated, and the only warmth to be found in a uniformly cool palette is in the ironic pastel shades that adorn the walls of the buildings - hues that aspire to a received perception of 'niceness' but are all the more jarring and unsettling for the apparent disingenuousness of thatintention.
The larger instutional agglomerations of McCormack's architectural phylum are clearly created from smaller individuals units, a metaphorical as well as visual allusion to the hierarchical nature of societal structure. The resultant configurations - angular and uncomprimising - seem particularly at odds with their pale mix-and-match plumage, presenting as a disquieting kind of 'pastel gothic'. They suggest echoes of institutional settings, with their own associative disquiets within the contemporary consciousness. McCormack's paintings are not proposed designs for living. Rather, they quietly but effectively offer warnings: of the consequences of isolationism both externally and internally imposed; of faceless institutional unaccountability; and of the dehumanising and aesthetically bereft tendencies of unregulated commodification.
Ian Wieczorek, artist

THE BAHH BAND at the Courthouse Gallery

THE BAHH BAND

Thursday 9th April
8 PM
8 euro

Classical Indian, with a difference...

The music has roots in the Classical Indian tradition but bridges the gap between such diverse influences as Ravi Shankar, Jimi Hendrix and Robert Johnson. The core members are Mattu on the sarode (a 25 stringed Indian Lute), Ciro on tabla (the famous Indian hand drums), Tom Portman on dobro (slide guitar) and vocals, Pauly Smalls on double bass and Brian Fleming on bodhran and percussion.

website: www.myspace.com/bahhband

"Bahh" is a Bengali word to express the inexpressible: literally means..."What words?"

'CROSSING THE DIVIDE'

'Crossing the Divide'
New paintings and photoworks
by
Josephine Geaney

Official opening by Gerry Slevin:
April 8th at 8pm


The title 'Crossing The Divide' alludes to the endless gamut of emotions endured by the isolation of the human spirit.

Josephines work portrays elements of isolation, confinement and a sense of loss reflected in the abyss that divides the inner and outer worlds of reality and fiction. The human figure represents a physical and emotional degree of isolation visible through the different levels of the picture plane.

She graduted from Limerick School of Art and Design with a B.A.(Hons) Degree in Fine Art Painting level 8 in 2008.

In 2006 she achieved The Hunt Museum Student Art award.

AN EVENING OF POETRY

Friday, 27th of March at 8 pm

'BLACKTHORN BLOSSOMS', by DESMOND MC LOUGHLIN

The Red Couches Space
in the Courthouse Gallery
presents:|

Contemporary Print Exhibition

'Blackthorn Blossoms'
A selection of fine-line etchings and woodcuts by

DESMOND MC LOUGHLIN

Exhibition Launch: Sat. 14th March at 8 pm
Exhibition runs from: 13th March - 4th April


Artist's Statement:

"I seek to express feeling and emotion through my images"

"L I V I N G T H R O U G H A I R" - New Paintings and Video Installation by FRANK GOLDEN

EXHIBITION LAUNCH by SIMON RATCLIFFE 14 - 3 -09 at 8 pm

'Living through air', New Paintings & Video Installation - FRANK GOLDEN

This show concerns itself with depictions of extreme events, extreme realities, notably paintings of the jumpers from the twin towers, which are based on downloaded photographes from the net.
Other sequences depict war, torture, rape, and privation in a pop figurative manner. Finally, there are paintings which allow the jumper figure to morph into the transfigurative image of a Yakut shaman based on nineteenth century photographs. The linkage between the jumper and the shaman is a personal one, with the jumper symbolising existential fallibility and the fall, while the shaman represents is its spiritual translation

Much contemporay art is seeking relevance in the face of terrible events seeks to excite an anlogous terror - lip sewing, eye sewing, extreme performances or the creation of extreme environments. The other option is to aestheticize the terror - just think of images of the crucifixion - to make it appoximate, quiescent, beautiful. Alongside these approaches we have as humans the desire to transfigure suffering, to define it as a clarifying, majestic apotheosis.

The Video Installation is in two parts, the first describes a double goose killing, the second a shaman - like exploration of their deaths. Only a percentage of us will substract life - we are happy to leave killing to others though we distance ourselves from the abattoir or mythologize the sociopath. The show questions whether these positions are replete with a diffident and hardy dishonesty as to the manner in which are witness to the world, and forgiving in terms of a critique of our own acts.