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.

BOZ MUGABE EXHIBITION LAUNCH at the GOURTHOUSE GALLERY

BOZ MUGABE

11- 28th FEBRUARY 2009

Boz Mugabe is a self-taught visual artist based in Dublin City.

He developed his ideas into impressive fine detailed ink-drawings on paper.
Mainly in black and white with atmospheric tones of grey and some added colours.
His work is a continued anthropological study, surveying human strength and tribal instinct. It investigates the human mind at it's own natural pace, rather than in a saturation of information, consumption and time when belief patterns are no longer sign of civilization.

"PREMONITIONS OF ENCROACHMENTS II"
Conceptually, this is a series consisting of images addressing the subject of fear, distraction and the superstitions of the human mind. It draws visually and thematically from many influences including illuminated manuscripts, Oriental print-works, pre-renaissance, eastern theology, secular and religious documents, but siphons the human elements rather than the antiquated ones.

for more information on Boz Mugabe, check out:
www.bozgallery.com

FILM NIGHT AT THE COURTHOUSE GALLERY

THE POWER OF COMMUNITY

"How communities came together to survive economic crisis and oil shortage

Also : Presentation - "What is peak oil?"

BOZ MUGABE

Boz Mugabe is a self-taught visual artist based in Dublin City