Volume V – I think I remember

Karl Burke, Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain
Image text sound: David Donohoe, Peter Maybury, Marie-Pierre Richard, Kathy Slade

Curated by Dennis McNulty

Preview: Friday 16 January 2009, 6pm - 8pm
Exhibition continues 17 January - 21 February 2009

Concert of Improvised music in association with i-and-e
Featuring Lucio Capece, David Lacey & Paul Vogel
Saturday 24 January at 7pm at the gallery
Admission €5, tickets at door

I think I remember is the fifth in a series of exhibitions at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios entitled Volume. Over the past five years, Volume has aimed to explore sound as a medium and subject in contemporary art, and has showcased innovative sound work by artists and curators based in and outside of Ireland. I think I remember is curated by Dennis McNulty, and features seven artists who often work with sound, but who might not necessarily consider themselves sound-artists. For these artists, sound is just one material, but one that is particularly important as a conduit for exploring ideas.

Sound is movement – movement in time – movement in space. How to capture it? Describe it? Remember it? Record it? Reflection, refraction, diffraction, absorption. Technologies have been developed to record sound but with technology comes debate about accuracy – fidelity – truthful representation. All devices that record images produce a point of view. The placement of the microphone defines the point of audition – background, foreground – sound communicates a sense of space and distance. And if the recording is revealed as accurate in some abstracted parameterised universe, in the end, our experience is never exactly the same. We can listen to the same recording on different days and hear it differently each time, because we have changed.

Karl Burke's sculptures, created in consultation with an acoustics expert, occupy the gallery space and attempt to alter its acoustic properties. Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain's search for a recording of the silence that accompanies a solar eclipse led them to the silences in Michaelangelo Antonioni's film L'Eclisse. Their work, Il Silencio dell'eclisse combines a sound piece and a notation of the process of erasure they have applied to the film's soundtrack to produce it - deleting all music and dialogue to leave fragments of recorded 'silence'. image text sound, a group composed of David Donohoe, Peter Maybury and Marie-Pierre Richard, also worked with a cinematic text to generate As much about forgetting as remembering, a silent film paradoxically full of sound. Kathy Slade's series of canvasses, entitled Chart, creates a web of contradictions by smearing pop on the modernist grid. Each canvas is embroidered with a diagram of a guitar chord notated in tablature, a form of musical notation that doesn't make sense without an original recording and a desire to emulate it.

At the centre of I think I remember is a space, an absence. Sounds are translated or interpreted or deleted or remembered, but always considered in relation to a listener. The artists struggle with memory or search in vain for a kind of perfect silence. The sound keeps on moving.

Dennis McNulty is an artist based in Dublin. McNulty represented Ireland at the São Paulo Bienal in 2004 and returned in 2008 with the collaborative multidisciplinary project Weightless Days. He was awarded a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris in 2005. Recent shows include, The sound I'm looking for, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (October 2008), Out of Site - Promenade, Dublin (November 2008) and Landscape 08, The Dock, Carrick On Shannon (July 2008). Solo shows include dx/dt at VOID (Derry, 2006) and most recently framework/rupture at Green On Red, Dublin (February 2008). Curatorial projects include Underground, Dublin (June 2008), a collaboration with Peter Maybury and Volume V at Temple Bar Galley & Studios (January 2009). He has also created soundtracks for the films Seaview (Still Films, 2008), Brazilia/Chandigarh (Louidgi Beltrame, 2008) and Helen (Desperate Optimists, 2008).

Karl Burke is an interdisciplinary artist and active musician based in Dublin whose practice includes sculpture, sound, installation works, photography and film. Winner of the 2007 Irish Emerging Visual Artist Award, recent solo exhibitions include ŒSpaces¹, Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford (2008), Common Place, Dublin (2007), and Gallery For One, Dublin (2006). www.karlhim.com

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain were born in Caxias do Sul, Brazil and are currently based in Paris, France. In 2007, they represented Brazil at the 52th Venice Biennial. In 2008, they presented solo shows at Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte and Jeu de Paume, Paris, among others; they also took part in collective exhibitions such as Underground, at Road Records, Dublin, and the 28th São Paulo Biennial, with a collaborative piece developed with artist Dennis McNulty and choreographers Megumi Matsumoto and Takeshi Yazaki.

Image text sound is a collaborative art practice and publishing entity based in Dublin. imagetextsound.com

David Donohoe is an artist, graphic designer and musician working with photography, video, text, music and sound. He also publishes bookworks, multiples and other limited editions. He has released music on D1 Recordings, Minimise, Force-Inc, Fällt and Mille-Plateaux.

Peter Maybury is an artist, musician and graphic designer. His work includes video and photographic projects, works for exhibition,

music and sound recordings. Under the 'Hard Sleeper' alias he has released CDs on the Emigré, Fällt and Sub Rosa labels, and is one half of the band Thread Pulls. He has designed and produced numerous arts related books and publications.

Marie-Pierre Richard is an artist and photographer with a background in film research and festival programming. In paris she organised retrospectives of many directors and re-issues of classic french films, and in Dublin was the festival director of the Dublin French Film Festival. Marie-Pierre now concentrates on video and photographic work.

Kathy Slade is an artist, writer, critic and a curator. Her art practice includes a variety of media such as video, photography, embroidery and sculpture. She has exhibited in Canada, China, Europe and the United States. Her writing has been published by Mix Magazine, C Magazine (Toronto), Artspeak Gallery, the Charles H. Scott Gallery (Vancouver), Open Space (Victoria), Printed Matter and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York). She earned a BA from Simon Fraser University where she studied Visual Art and English.

Press Contact: Rayne Booth - Temple Bar Gallery & Studios - t. + 353 1 671 0073 - e. press@templebargallery.com