Mark Clare
I Believe In You
September 12–November 1, 2014
Crawford Art Gallery
Emmet Place
Cork
Ireland
T+ 353 21 4805042
info [at] crawfordartgallery.ie
Crawford Art Gallery presents a major solo exhibition of Mark Clare. I Believe In You offers new insights into the work of Mark Clare, who, in his role as a creative public agent, seeks to engage with and highlight unresolved incongruities within our societies, placing scrutiny on the combative issues of globalization, individualism and public space.
The exhibition takes its title from one of three works created specifically for the Crawford Art Gallery, and features a number of key works from the last five years of Mark Clare’s practice. The large-scale installation I believe in you, designed to follow the gallery’s high arched ceiling, explores notions of society’s perceived disaffection with political engagement, and our complex relationships with public institutions.
Mark Clare’s necessity to make, to construct, to create a dialectic framework to reflect upon structures or scenes that make us think about how social space is organized, is a sustained feature of Clare’s practice. Clare uses his mobile, multiple forms of art to assist in imagining how our expectations of public space—whether as physical location or as an idea of collective belonging—might also be freed from present orthodoxies and hierarchies, just as they also become newly informed by under-acknowledged histories. He is not so much a detractor of ideologies but a commentator on their fallibility—illustrated in the video Quickness (2014), which alludes to the anxiety of projected failure in an attempt to capture society’s fraught relationship with speed that is endemic. Clare’s work is habitually layered with intersecting micro and macro perspectives. In agitating the viewer’s social conscience, Mark Clare deftly diffuses and heightens these tensions with humour and spectacle, yet the work is subtle and nuanced, offering the viewer pathways to reflect and engage in scrutinizing cultural misnomers.
Mark Clare (born 1968) currently lives and works in Dublin. His projects include Art Nomads Lademoen Kunsternerverksteder (LVK), Trodheim, Norway; Kunstverein Hanover, Germany; The Red House, Syracuse, New York; La Grange Art Museum, Georgia, USA and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
The publication I Believe in You will accompany the exhibition with contributions from Declan Long, Megan Johnston and Mary Cremin, published by the Crawford Art Gallery, supported by Language Design, Dublin.
The exhibition Mark Clare: I Believe in You is made possible with the generous support of the National Sculpture Factory and The Guest House, Cork, Ireland.
Press enquiries: exhibitions [at] crawfordartgallery.ie
For the full programme, please check our website or Crawford Art Gallery newsletter.
