Lightness

Lightness was a group exhibition that includes video and sculpture installations and brings together the work of `five artists who are concerned with the struggle to find pattern and meaning in the seemingly random, strange and mysterious world we live in. The selected artists share a study of perception, form and our understanding of the world, sometimes constructing a parallel world of sensory perception. Often working with familiar materials and unravelling everyday phenomenon in an attempt to understand the world in which we live, these works playfully collide or reveal a fragility and precariousness - sometimes hinting at the sublime or awe inspiring - underlying our everyday natural and constructed environments.

In a loose or from a sideways position, the ideas for the exhibition come to us from Milan Kundera’s novel 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', where Milan Kundera explores a light and heaviness that he associates with outlooks and ways of being in the world. Eternal return, or Amor Fati, is used to describe an outlook in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as character building. In a counter point to this view, Kundera argues that we only have the opportunity to try one path, and hence we have no point of comparison or meaning. Instead, those characters who are heavy cannot accept this unbearable lightness of being, and seek to attach a meaning and weight to what they consider important in life. The artists in this exhibition were selected for their curiosity and wonder in things, and in the world around them - an outlook which they bring in their various practices to their art-making.

‘We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.’ Milan Kundera

Suki Chan , Tomorrow is our Permanent Address

Tomorrow... oscillates between a mysterious, uncanny cityscape and the artist's studio. The viewer is transported to a meticulously constructed environment where control is played out against lack-of-control. Chan creates a dream-like journey through an imaginary, futuristic city made from upturned glasses shrouded in fog. The audience is taken in unexpected directions, virtually knocking glasses down which shatter into pieces around them. Tomorrow... uses a cinematic device to create a sense of anticipation and mystique, the low-lying fog both dissolves and reveals the periphery of the studio set-up. We lose ourselves and our sense of scale as we are transported on a surreal and seductive journey. The sound of the fog-machine and the artist's movements in the background return us periodically to the artificality of our experience. At moments we become distinctly aware of the artist's choice of framing, her presence in the construction of the towers of glasses, the boundaries of the studio as well as the smoke machine. Chan's playful installation makes references to the processes in which shots are staged and narrative is constructed.

Sofi Loscher Untitled (balloon + fan)

Sofi Loscher Untitled (balloon + fan), consists of a high velocity fan and a large black latex balloon that hovers over the fan for the duration of the show.
Sofie Loscher is a visual artist based in Dublin, her practice primarily focuses on installation with a scientific underpinning. It makes connections between the physical and visual, exploring issues of coercion, stability, attraction, repulsion and contradiction. Loscher appropriates domestic objects to find strange and unknown functions in their performances, and through manipulation, subverts the context of the original material.

Tracy Hanna

Tracy Hanna works primarily with video projection to create sculptural objects and environments. Within her work the artist is concerned with phenomenological engagement. The work she creates is a response to her interactions with specific environments and objects. Hanna works intuitively using knowledge gathered from experience so that the work she produces is a reaction to the places she encounters. Her concerns are sculptural; within her installations she pays close attention to texture, scale, sound, light, darkness and all tactile and sensory elements.