Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh makes Site Specific artwork, varying from an exploration of self-discovered sites of relatively unknown cultural significance, to the re-evaluation or altering of socially and politically engaged sites. A key theme in Ó Dochartaigh’s work is the local becoming global. He is interested in highlighting national origins and cultural displacement as represented through a skewed botany and natural history, from the introduction of foreign or adoptive species, to the hybridization of the native.

This project was made possible with the support of Nicky Keogh who designed the suitcase foldable paper canoe 2 and his invaluable engineering skills in helping construct canoe 1(Stella). Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh also thanks the Arts council of Northern Ireland for their ongoing support.




Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh was born in Derry in 1978. He graduated from the University of Ulster in 2000 and is based in Derry. He has contributed to Circa and VAN Irish contemporary art publications and over the past ten years received Individual General Art Awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI). In 2006/7 Ó Dochartaigh was the recipient of the Artist in the Community Art Award (ACNI) and recently completed an International Residency in Winnipeg, also supported by ACNI. Since 2003 Ciarán has been a voluntary member of the Curatorial committee/ Board of Directors at Void Gallery Derry. In 2010 Ciarán will start a two Year MFA at Goldsmiths College, London.

Witch Hunt
8th July – 13th August 2010
Opening reception 7.30 – 10pm
Featuring a performance by Delaine Le Bas at 9pm

“Witch Hunt is a mass of limitless contradictions. There is nothing subtle about this work, not in its scale or message. Initially, it is like being stuck in a postmodern whirlwind with thousands of voices being articulated by the braying mob. Once the over-stimulation subsides, the phenomenal detail of Delaine’s embroidery and textiles, the high level of attention to every corner of the gallery comes to the fore. The outsider is no longer the outsider, but united in this carnival of exile.”

Debbie Savage, AN, 2010

As part of the UK Romany community (Roma being the largest ethnic minority in Europe), Delaine Le Bas explores many of the experiences of intolerance, misrepresentation, transitional displacement and homelessness that the community continues to face. Witch Hunt is a multimedia project comprising installation, performance and new music. Delaine has created new ecclesial structures reflecting the religious dimension of the ‘Witch Hunt’, weaving within them new work which explores the role of language in identifying the ‘other’.

Witchcraft was built around words, as much dependent on lost ways of speaking as on particular incantations. Witches, like Gypsies, have provoked unmatched levels of hysteria, excitement and persecution. Their tongues may not be forked, but they threaten invisible borders as outsiders camped within.

Witch Hunt was originally shown at aspex Gallery, Portsmouth (www.aspex.org.uk), subsequently presented at Chapter, Cardiff (www.chapter.org) in February 2010 and is the first presentation of Le Bas’s work in Ireland. Le Bas’ work was also included in Paradise Lost, The First Roma Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2007; Refusing Exclusion, Prague Biennale 3, Prague 2007; Living Together, Museo De Arte Contmeporanea De Vigo, Spain 2009 (curated by Emma Dexter and Xabier Arakistain) and is currently exhibiting in Foreigners Everywhere, T293, Napoli (curated by Claire Fontaine) which was also shown at Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel, November 2009.She is included in ‘Sixty Innovators Shaping Our Creative Future’ by Thames & Hudson.

Delaine Le Bas acknowledges the support of the Arts Council Of England, Lottery fund. Delaine Le Bas is represented by Galleria Sonia Rosso, Turin (www.soniarosso.com) and Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin (www.nourbakhsch.de)

Preview: Thursday 8 July, 7.30 – 10pm

Featuring a performance by Delaine Le Bas at 9pm

In over 150 North American Aboriginal cultures, the Berdashe, or village transvestite, was an accepted and often celebrated member of the tribe. Although the tradition has not been well documented (it is certain that in the case of George Catlin the lack of representation was deliberate), knowledge of its presence reveals a more complex understanding of Aboriginal and sexual identities. The persona of Miss Chief challenges the authoritative version of history by playing the starring role in “period” photographs, romantic paintings and silent era films such as Group of Seven Inches and Robin’s Hood. Through this re-imaging of history, missing narratives are explored as Miss Chief subverts the authority of the artists who created images of Aboriginal people in the 19th century.

In Group of Seven Inches, and Robin’s Hood she leaps back in time and rearranges the colonial story, composing an unexpected sequence of events. In both films she plays the part of an Aboriginal explorer, approaching European subjects with a removed curiosity. On the walls surrounding the Théâtre Miss Chief has borrowed from Paul Kane and George Catlin’s prose for musings on her subject, the European Male:

They are noble, gentlemanly,
and high minded, although
they are they often prone to
argument and fierce bouts
of independence.

The history and customs of such
a people, preserved by pictorial
illustrations, are themes worthy
of the lifetime of one artist, and
nothing short of the loss of my
life shall prevent me from
knowing them and becoming
their historian.

She exerts an authorial role in her historical encounters, a tradition her forebears’ started long ago when they invented songs and dances to entertain Europeans who thought they were observing an “authentic” ceremony. In 1906, for example, the Hopi Indians performed a “Death Song” in Berlin for circus goers, subsequently, in 1963, it was discovered that this ritual song did not even exist in Hopi culture. The video is projected from the chandelier into a geometric pattern, mimicking that of the buffalo count, and allowing viewing from every angle both inside and outside the structure. The shimmering Théâtre de Cristal recalls the glamour of a Victorian ballroom, however its light form makes a macabre gesture, it rebeads the history of contact and
conquest.

Robin’s Hood
Robin’s Hood is the final chapter in a trilogy of the adventures and histories of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a wandering artist from the Great Plains of North America. She journeys far across the seas to study the unspoiled European Male in his native habitat where she meets the handsome Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, but realizes too late that one can never trust a white man, especially on his own turf.

Group of Seven Inches
Group of Seven Inches borrows from the diaries of 19th century painters of “Indians,” George Catlin and Paul Kane, turning their dismissive writings on the “romantic savage” upside down and inside out (more of these text are also inscribe on the walls surrounding the tipi). Miss Chief Eagle Testickle (the outrageous alter ego of Cree artist Kent Monkman), forces innocent naked white men to become her figure models, seduces them with whiskey, and when she’s done with them, dresses them up as more “authentic” examples of the “European male.” Shot on the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario, Group of Seven Inches subverts the subjectivity and authority of colonial art history and everything else it can get its
hands on.

Théâtre de Cristal
Kent Monkman

Curated by Steve Loft

4th June – 30th June 2010
Opening reception 7.30 – 10pm
Artist’s talk at 8pm

Kent Monkman is a Canadian artist of Cree ancestry who works with a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance, and installation. He has had solo exhibitions at numerous Canadian museums including the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Hamilton. He has participated in various international group exhibitions including: “We come in peace…” Histories of the Americas, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, The American West, at Compton Verney, in Warwickshire, England, and presently the 2010 Sydney Biennale.

Monkman has created site specific performances at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, The Royal Ontario Museum, and at Compton Verney, and has also made super 8 versions of these performances which he calls “Colonial Art Space Interventions.” His award-winning short film and video works have been screened at various national and international festivals, including the 2007 and 2008 Berlinale, and the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival.

His work is represented in numerous public and private collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Museum London, The Glenbow Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, The Mackenzie Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Simthsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. He is represented by Bailey Fine Arts, Toronto, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK, and Trepanier Baer Gallery, Calgary.

www.kentmonkman.com

Nouvelle Allégeance
NUMA

19^th March – 30^th April 2010

Few painters can change our very sense of what a painting can look like. Numa , as one of these artist’s, renders a confident form of painting, surprising us that the works are embedded into the wall and mastered without the use of any digital prop. By installing directly into the wall he challenges and questions perceptions and ideals of conventional framing as well as gallery and museum wall space. As a viewer you begin by asking, “How did this painting arrive in this time and space?” In a digital world like the one we are living, one immediately assumes that the images are computer generated due to their high level of skill. Approaching the work you are shocked to realize a series of tiny hand painted lines that cover vast amounts of space. Numa renders all of his work using very intricate and interlaced lines that create optical illusions and abstractions. These seem to never end when observing. Responding to the visibility or invisibility of the individual, Numa’s iconoclastic forms are engaging not only due to the fact that they are installed, but because of their meditative qualities, beauty and strength.

Robin Schurman

Montréal-based artist Numa Amun has participated in exhibitions at Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary, Galerie René Blouin, Montréal, the 2007 Biennale de Montréal: Crack the Sky, and other visual art and music projects.

The gallery will host a series of commissions over the coming year where the work will be in place for a minimum of six weeks and a maximum of three months. The lightboxes will be mounted directly outside the gallery, accessible to the public both during and outside of regular gallery hours.

SARA GREAVU

ALLAN HUGHES

BENJAMIN DE BURCA

For any additional information on the commission please contact the gallery at 028 71373538 or email info@contextgallery.co.uk

Sara Greavu lives and works in Derry. She works in a variety of media including video, sound, photography, and sculpture.  She has recently exhibited work in Belfast, Dublin and Washington D.C.

She is on the curating committee of Void Gallery and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Ulster in Belfast.

These works are based on my ongoing documentation of the Halloween carnival in Derry. I am particularly interested in the prevalence of ‘ethnic drag’ or racechanging costumes and in those that depict players in other highly charged binaries or situations of conflict (PSNI officers, IRA volunteers, minstrels, Guantanamo prisoners, KKK, soldiers, suicide bombers, Hamas, harem girls, American Indians, etc). I am interested in the possibility that the adoption of these costumes might constitute a performance of ‘surrogation’, or the filling of ‘cavities’ left by loss in this society as a result of protracted conflict. In these surrogations, alternative roles are adopted and alternative scenarios are played out. These may not be direct depictions of events, but rather relate to the sociopolitical context in the manner of a dream, with distortions, substitutions and discontinuities.

Allan Hughes is an artist based in Belfast and working out of Orchid Studios Recent exhibitions of work have included a solo show at The Golden Thread Gallery and work for the Process Room in IMMA as part of his residency programme. His works have also been shown at the Mediations Biennale, Poznan, Poland; UNOACTU, Dresden; Novisibrisk State Art Museum, Russia, London Art Fair; La Sala Naranja Valencia; Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast and the Beursschouwburg in Brussels amongst others. Hughes is currently in the final stages of completing his PhD in Fine Art at the University of Ulster and has work in an upcoming exhibition at the K YU Art Centre in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Further information can be found at www.allanhughes.com

These images are from an ongoing series of photographs I have been making over the last three years. All the images are of car parks, at night, either closed or inaccessible and predominantly empty. The images explore an aspect of the super modern non-place and in the particulars of the chosen images here; the closed entrances to private parking spaces, documented in Dublin while on residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

The car park is a site unlike any other in our contemporary architecture and is arguably the last vestigial success of the modernist architectural project: the living utopian project of form after function; a material order of, repetition, homogeneity and inclusive utilitarianism. Fitting that only the car park has survived the failure of this project, the way having been paved for more traditional, pastoral living experiments. For the car park is more than this. The car park offers a psychic connection to the desire for a communion; a meeting place for the sense of imminent possibility. The car park represents an excess of space an extension for the mechanics of modern living waiting in a state of incompletion. It is an afterthought in our design but one that we must not overlook. It is the way in to our architectural psyche, the covered, concealed and private passageways to our thinking, the orificial architecture that is both within and without.

In Search Of The Other Crowd
Amy Russell

15^th January – 27^th February 2010

Amy Russell’s new body of work, In Search of the Other Crowd is a series of night-time and day-time shots. The work takes its influence from Irish myths and legends such as The Tuatha Dé Danann, magic, mortality and the unknown mystical other worlds of spirit and form. The sometimes abstract blurred figures contained within some of the photographs are in search of something: notions of the physical world versus the spirit world. This multi-layered work emanates hints of playfulness, mysticism and melancholy.

In Search of the Other Crowd was shot completely with a Holga camera, an inexpensive medium format (120 film) toy camera, made in China and appreciated for its low-fidelity aesthetic. The Holga’s cheap construction and simple meniscus lens often yields pictures that display vignetting, blurring, light leaks, and other distortions. Russell utilizes the low-fi sensibility of the camera and chooses to see these technical properties as challenging and virtuous aspects of her process.

The Holga camera is light, durable and easy to transport. It is a shot in the dark literally, taking some of the photographs until they become finely tuned with serendipity playing a part. Russell’s process entails a long and involved approach requiring multiple shots in many locations in order to capture the perfect lighting or spacing of figures and props. The process is similar to trying to perfect a painting, reworking it until she gets the perfect negative. Some of the shots are double exposures adding extra layers of abstract meaning or dream like effects.

Amy Russell is a visual artist originally from West Cork.

Russell graduated from Limerick School Of Art and Design with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and in 2005 received an MFA at the University of Ulster. In 2007 Russell completed a Certificate in Youth Art at Maynooth College, Dublin.

As a visual artist, Russell works mainly in photography with strands of her practice intertwined with object making and sculpture. Russell has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with her work shown at The Corner House, Manchester, Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast and Gatov and Merlino Galleries in Los Angeles. Russell has recently completed residencies in New York, NY and Winnipeg, Canada.

End Of The Road (beginning of the sky)
Fiona Larkin

13^th November – 12^th December 2009

Artist’s talk led by Shirley MacWilliam: Thursday 12th November, 2 pm

Opening Reception: 13^th November 7.30pm – 10pm

Fiona Larkin’s new work for the exhibition End Of The Road (beginning of the sky) takes form in a series of experiential investigations that examine the nature of accidental history and fragmented stories.

The artist sets out from the local, incidental occurrance of Amelia Earhart’s having landed her airplane in Gallagher’s field just outside Derry City, out of fuel and lost. This body of work looks at the idea of this event as being something established as pivotal or ‘significant’ by a process of historicisation rather than an acknowledgment of the chance or even accidental nature of that event. History, in turn, is fugitive and allows itself to be written by a series of remembered experiential narratives, the re-telling of the “I was there”, where the significance of people, places and actions become both burdened and supported by partial documentations.

Each of Larkin’s works arises from looking for things lost or missing. In doing so they touch on the sense of allowing to be carried along, surrendering to the determination of significant chance elements: the wind and the kindness of strangers. Partial documentation and emblematic outputs function to support the idea of the artist as the determining element of production in the event and concurrently a narrator. The artist as an intervention becomes a connective tissue between the action, the material production and the spectators access to the story.

The work perhaps suggests that we are all bystanders in history, even Earhart, when we surrender ourselves to the elements of chance, significance and signification is a misnomer that must be mediated to produce meaning.

Fiona Larkin is an artist working in a range of media, primarily video, action, drawing and more recently, Super 8. She was born in Dublin and received her BA from N.C.A.D. in 1998. She has lived and worked in Belfast since completing her MFA in the University of Ulster in 2004. Her work has been presented both locally and internationally at This Is Not A Shop, Dublin, Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo and OMAC, Belfast.

She has curated a number of projects as Travel Agents Projects in collaboration with Manchester based artist Jane Anderson. She is a studio holder at Flax Art and Chair of the Board at the Digital Art Studios and currently lectures at the University of Ulster, Belfast.