Niamh O’Malley
Garden
26 April–22 June 2013
Opening: Thursday, 25 April
Project Arts Centre
39 East Essex Street, Temple Bar
Dublin 2, Ireland
gallery [at] projectartscentre.ie
www.projectartscentre.ie
Facebook
Niamh O’Malley’s recent film works have often taken monumental sites as their subjects, including one of the world’s longest bridges, an island made symbolic through Catholic pilgrimage, and an immense working quarry. In Garden, O’Malley shifts her focus to a more intimate subject—a walled inner city garden that is a natural site of production, intention and the shaping of space.
A dual-channel video shows a mirror panning and tilting, reversing the normal flow of light and camera movement, and telling us—if only momentarily—that we are looking through a wall and into another world. Although the person clutching the mirror operates it as an extension of their own sensory field (and against the tension of the physical difficulty of holding it steady for long stretches of time), the perceiver, through the subjective gaze of the camera, has somehow disappeared. While understanding that the body holding the frame is the orchestrator of our attention, we also realise that our own position in the frame has been tampered with, tricking us into perceiving with a body that now seems to not be there at all. Like an analogue allegory for a digital age, illusion and confusion are orchestrated without special effects, and yet produced entirely with digital materials.
Accompanying the video, and set into a wooden seating platform, a large glass pane is painted on both sides. It complicates ideas of reverse, background, and negative space, in a process that has unfolded with something of a domino effect. Stimulated by chance occurrences, one mark makes necessary another—the way things go.
Niamh O’Malley and Tessa Giblin, Project Arts Centre Curator of Visual Art, will give an informal introduction to Garden on Thursday 25 April at 5:30pm.
Project Arts Centre is a multidisciplinary arts centre in the heart of Dublin, Ireland. Currently on national tour is Mikala Dwyer (AU), Panto Collapsar, at Wexford Arts Centre until 8 May. Forthcoming projects include exhibitions of Mario Garcia Torres (MX) and Jennifer Tee (NL) and Project Press e-reader publications about Ceal Floyer, Mikala Dwyer, Clodagh Emoe and Niamh O’Malley.
Gallery exhibition hours: Monday–Saturday 11–8pm
Admission to the visual arts at Project Arts Centre is always free.
Project Arts Centre is supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council.
