It Goes On

Alan Butler, Brendan Flaherty, Eilis McDonald, James Merrigan, Ivan Twohig, Soft Blonde Moustache.

Curated by Rayne Booth

Preview: Tuesday 2 June 2009
Exhibition continues 3 June – 18 July 2009

It Goes On is an exhibition featuring artists who have graduated from formal education in the past five years. Each of the artists in this exhibition have continued their distinctive artistic practices at an intense pace since leaving college, exhibiting regularly in artist run spaces, self initiated exhibitions, and curated shows. Each of the artists in this exhibition are emerging; still developing their artistic ideas, striving to find a platform and negotiate the pitfalls and obstacles that this difficult career choice brings.

The title It Goes On is a reference to a quote by the poet Robert Frost*. In the context of this exhibition it refers to the fact that artists will continue to make art which satisfies their own concerns and interests, influenced by or regardless of outside stimuli such as galleries, curators, and international art trends. This show is also intended as a snapshot of what is going on in a particular city at a given time amongst a certain generation of artists. These young artists work comfortably within the vast range of possibilities brought up by new media and the internet, and they are highly aware of how their work fits in to the international landscape of contemporary art. Despite recessions, wars and global crises, there will always be a new wave of emerging artists waiting in the wings to take over from the current crop. Art, like everything, goes on.

Alan Butler is interested in exploring the ways in which we experience global culture. Through the use of appropriation and remixing of cultural artefacts and icons, Butler combines the disparate lineages of items to create new ideas and ‘truths’. Butlers work for ‘It Goes On’, The Image Factory, is a painted diptych that simultaneously exists as a conceptual art work connecting art, mass production, the media, consumerism and art history in a convoluted web

Brendan Flaherty’s paintings look at issues of man’s place in nature and his need to employ his own system of order on the world. Flaherty paints on heavily reworked canvasses, meaning that the paintings go through several evolutionary stages before completion. He is interested in conventions that form around the making of paintings, how motifs and symbols are employed and how they determine the reading of an image. His work taps into the continuous historical lineage of image making. He references recurring ideas and archetypes, how different generations and cultures respond to similar themes.

Eilis McDonald’s practice incorporates installation, painting, video, animation, sound, computer and Internet based work, with an emphasis on humour, spirituality, pop culture and visual energy. For this exhibition, McDonald will be showing a series of animated .gifs entitled ‘Reflections’. Using an online ‘water-effect’ generator McDonald added animated reflections to found online images, providing them with a sense of stillness, reverence and absurdity while referencing the 'dirtstyle' aesthetic of the early days of homepages and amateur internet design. Like much of McDonald's work, the piece evokes nostalgia though visual languages, trinkets and technologies of the recent past and enthusiastically embraces an unrefined folkart sensibility.

James Merrigan’s practice is focused on the idea of the event, and how we, as an audience, capture or read the event. He fabricates these events from videos and paraphernalia that are crudely cut fractions of a bigger happening. Merrigan’s work centres around ideas of crisis, horror, ritual, and the fear of banality. Against this backdrop, his main goal is to transform the normal or sincere into a narrative that is potentially hazardous.

Ivan Twohig’s work operates at the convergence between fine art, architecture, design and pop culture and is often made in response to the pressures such classifications have upon young artists attempting to locate and position themselves in the world. Twohig has always been influenced by architecture and the relationship between the natural and built environments. The work is made using architectural computer programmes to create origami-like paper sculptures, which he constructs with the help of the numerical formula or instructions provided by the computer programme.

Soft Blonde Moustache is a collective of four artists, Nessa Darcy, Mary-Jo Gilligan, Julia McConville and Aileen Murphy Since they graduated from college in 2007, they have been meeting regularly in order to make art together in a collaborative drawing and singing process. During their drawing sessions, they converse, improvise and play; responding to each others marks and ideas. Unpolished and scrappy paper is a starting point for the contour of a line. Drawings emerge out of responses and also out of accidents that the artists claim. They work together aside from their individual practices not just in order to make art, but to play, interact and exchange.

*‘In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.

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