6/8/2009
Two exhibitions
Four, Dublin
Fiona Marron - Sara Barker
For who knows what
Fiona Marron
Curated by Carolina Hoffmann & Lee Welch
FOUR presents LAUNCH 09, an exhibition now on its 4th edition initiated to support young emerging Irish artists at an early stage of their professional practice, helping them gain public exposure. The exhibition takes up gallery one and presents a three-part single channel high-definition video installation. Marron explores and reflects on the emotional and physical effects of economic change, consumerism, and architecture in relation to function and human activity within commercial environments.
“There was truth in what they said”, is an 11 minute long elegy to the rise and fall of our economic epoch. The video is a journey into the space of the former European Headquarters of the New York Exchange and its remains. An almost sci-fi looking scenario that unveils a forgotten eventless space, with its notice boards and statements still clinging to the walls. This peculiar setting, once an instance for economic security, is now an open testimony of loss and decadence.
Marron stresses here the relationship between the viewer and the architecture, merging two different truths, thus discovering that the space of the video is not distant from the reality of the beholder. The exhibition is a logical outcome of the artist's previous interests and research regarding property, and the human desire to possess. Adopting a documentary type approach in her work, Marron reflects upon the ghost of our present day circumstances.
Each video considers socio-economical changes of our time, using timeless and ubiquitous references. Thus, albeit having dealt with spaces located in Dublin, the artist stresses her interest of these as “universal contemporary signifiers for a spirit in a time”.
“Fend” and “Plenty of Furniture” complete Marron’s suspended metaphor. The first one confronts the viewer with a fencing bout in a vast empty space of empyrean light. The fencers move in and out of the frame while the moderator remains still. The scores are communicated over the duration of the combat, but the aim of the contest remains occult. The stage for this piece was a not so long ago a semi-derelict site - with one building home to a betting shop, recently turned into a new spacious office building as part of a new initiative to regenerate the area.
The second, the only piece that remains filmed from a fixed position, shows a warehouse filled with office furniture. All of a sudden the viewer discovers that within the tangle of objects, almost imperceptible, appears the seller, lost in a jungle of boredom, absorbed by his newspaper.
Fiona Marron was born in Co. Monaghan in 1987. In 2009 she graduated from Fine Art at Dublin Institute of Technology and now lives and works in Dublin. In 2007 she co-founded the art collective Cannon Fodder. In the past, Marron has exhibited in several group shows around Dublin, including 8≥20 at the Back Loft and Interim Dialogues at Broadstone. Recently, following her graduate exhibition, Fiona has been nominated to represent Visual Arts at DIT to European League of Institutes of Arts. Marron's work will also be exhibited as part of a series of screenings in the architecture department at UCD. Other upcoming exhibitions include a group exhibition at Pallas Contemporary Projects and a solo exhibition at The Joinery. Marron will partake in her first residency, as part of the International project Reverse Pedagogy at the Model Arts & Niland Gallery in Sligo.
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Plant Dreaming Deep
Sara Barker
Curated by Aoife Tunney
For her exhibition at FOUR, Sara Barker will present a precarious sculptural grouping in the gallery, pushing material to a point of fragility and slightness of form. Sara’s recent work centres on the room as an abstract notion on which to hang an interior state, taking on the attributes of a character- their ‘aloneness and inhibition’, in their own space.
It is with her eye on literary conceptions of ‘room’ that she explores constructs of working and living space in relation to her own private process. The idea of a room is elaborated on as a metaphor for and a symbol of identity and liberation, restriction and conformity. It is a necessary space but with implicit cultural boundaries, and its own incumbent freedoms and limitations.
In recent work, she draws indirectly on the journals of May Sarton:
“I am alone here and ‘the house and I resume old conversations’… The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again…I have made an open place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself in it?”
Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton.
In preparing for this show, Sara was drawn to Maeve Brennan’s short stories, particularly the posthumous collection set in Dublin, The Springs of Affection, particularly such apparently simple and direct stories of family life as The Sofa and The Carpet with the Big Pink Roses on It.
From these points of reference and interest, Sara applies a formal and regulatory structure: a routine within her practice.
Rather than the illustrative, Sara inspires individual perception, memory and influence, by way of a 'painterly' shift from the real.
Recent exhibitions include The Actuality of the Idea, Modern Art, London and Base: Object, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Sara has recently completed the Rome residency at the British School at Rome, and is represented by Mary Mary, Glasgow.
FOUR is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council.
Image: Fiona Marron
Opening: Friday 7 August 2009 6-8pm
Four
11 Burgh Quay - Dublin
Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday: 12 to 5 pm