Mikala Dwyer
Panto Collapsar
26 January–31 March 2012
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
39 East Essex Street, Temple Bar
Dublin 2, Ireland
gallery [at] projectartscentre.ie
www.projectartscentre.ie
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we are stardust (billion year old carbon) we are golden
Panto Collapsar, the title of Mikala Dwyer’s new exhibition at Project Arts Centre, leads us to believe that the engine at the centre of our existence (the metaphorical star) is likely to collapse into a black hole in an action of buffoonery, mimicry and with audience participation. The hysterical splendour of the annual panto will be combined with an oblique golden storyline, including semblances of gold sensing, allusions to the facts and fictions surrounding gold, and its geological, mythological, or newly reported extra-terrestrial origins (supposedly introduced by meteorite impacts 4 billion years ago). Panto Collapsar might thus be called a micro-economic folktale.
The elements that will build and grow like a garden of unearthly delights are essentially a community and, as such, are totally dependent upon each other. When Dwyer brings objects, artefacts and materials together in a group formation, it is as though she’s asking them to speak together of the future and of the unknown—as the artist puts it: to ‘shore themselves up against everything they’ve lost.’ This resonates in the exhibitions, revealing a sense of togetherness and communication amongst the individual pieces that are set up as though in conversation with each other—the installations or accumulations can resemble anything from a gathering or theatre set to the detritus of a black-magic ritual séance.
Hovering above a circle formation will be a sky filled with shimmering silver shapes, threatening to descend upon the skinny golden shapes that rise from the ground beneath it. Dwyer’s golden baseline, or ‘superstitious scaffolding’ will populate the void between the hovering canopy of silver, floating ‘O’ shapes, marking the territory that for the sacred time of the exhibition will be a place protected by natural forces—dark, light, cosmic, and comical.
Mikala Dwyer is one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists, one whose work has influenced generations of younger artists in the South Pacific. Her work is playfully mischievous while being deadly precise in its activation of form, and consistently presses at the limits of the potentiality of things—to be more, other than, or contradictory to what we might expect. She is also expert at harnessing or investing essential energy matter around objects. The effect is to leave you feeling as though you’re in the presence of something mystical, which has temporarily come together before falling apart again. To ritualise, and to create a community of forms through her circular groupings, Dwyer sees the potential to give soul back to things that are dead.
Curated by Tessa Giblin
Richard Proffitt
We Sell Soul
In 2012 we will inaugurate Project’s new experimental portal—the Grotto—with an installation by Richard Proffitt (UK): with We Sell Soul, Richard Proffitt will work with the idea of the cabinet as a ‘kiosk’, a personalised space, and a psychedelic cabin full of hippie memorabilia, tropes of counterculture, the occult and Vietnam paraphernalia.
Project Arts Centre is a multidisciplinary arts centre in the heart of Dublin, Ireland. The visual arts program commissions and curates new exhibitions with leading artists from around the world, and is supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. Admission to the Gallery of Project Arts Centre is always free.
