Alan Butler - IntheBedroom OMIGOD SUBSCRIBE!!! KTHXBAI XXX

126 presents:
Alan Butler
IntheBedroom OMIGOD SUBSCRIBE!!! KTHXBAI XXX

November 25th until December 18th

The exhibition is a new selection of mixed media works, which use the proliferation of culture as their subject or starting points. Through drawing, video, print and installation, Butler has produced a series of works, which abstractly examine the life-cycle of musical artifacts and paraphernalia that have been reproduced as ‘tributes’ to well known works.

The research for the works in this exhibition is based on new modes of production which challenge the 20th Century’s producer/consumer model of transmission for film and music. In recent years, consumers have become both producers of and audience for the multitude of entertainment and cultural artifacts available online. Butler has collected and appropriated 20 versions of a pop song from 1974 (performed and uploaded YouTube.com users) and synchronised these to create an absurd, and at moments unpleasant, virtual choir from the song’s re-interpretations. The original videos in raw format are testament to the genuine passion and love people have for culture. The mash-up, which presents us with the aimlessness of this kind of activity, highlights the very human need to produce our own culture and share it with like-minded individuals, regardless of its collective uncouthness. It presents to us a network of people from many different age, ethnic, gender and geographical backgrounds who are connected by one song and asks the question ‘who owns culture outside of commerce and copyright (with its ever-dwindling relevance)?’ Are these performers, singing to an unknown audience, the unknowing authors of a new folk art?

A new series of 2D works use appropriated content from online fan sites to present hidden spectacles which sometimes go unnoticed due to the abundance of information online. These works are made from collections of album bootlegs re-arranged by colour and presented as colourful matrices. Also exhibited are drawings combining logos of teeny pop-stars and grindcore/death-metal acts which contrast the very definite methods of visually presenting or branding music.

The exhibition will also feature an ‘offsite’ online work which can be accessed after visiting the gallery. Much of the content from this show is created in a similar manner to its subjects, rather than needing a studio it could have been produced in a garage or a bedroom and uploaded to share with anyone interested.

Alan Butler was born in Dublin in 1981. He completed his BA of Fine Art (specialising in new media) in NCAD in 2004 and has complimented his prolific studio practice with various curatorial, art-community and art management projects. Some of these include work for the Dublin Fringe Festival, Dublin Art Fair ’08, Monster Truck Gallery & Studios, Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Blackletter.ie (Irish online art-community) and the Dublin Arts and Technology Association (DATA). Since his MAFA at LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore (2008-09) Butler’s art work has featured in projects and exhibitions at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore, Hatje Cantz Con prefazione di Angela Vettese, Venice and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Most recently, he has had solo exhibitions at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios and Cake Contemporary Arts, Kildare, and a collaborative exhibition at the Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray. He currently occupies a project studio at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios where he listens to Gwar.

Jennifer Brady - The View From Here

Tulca 2010 & 126 presents:
Jennifer Brady

The View From Here
November 6th until November 21st

For Tulca 2010, 126 presents The View From Here, an exhibition of Brady’s new video works exploring the everyday spaces we inhabit from radical and fantastical perspectives, varying from conspiracy theory, gaming culture to virtual landscapes. The works themselves address notions of place, using narrative devices, voiceover and soundtracking elements with which to re-imagine these spaces such as the city, the suburban park and computer gaming landscapes. The exhibition seeks to revise and destabilise the ways in which we perceive these familiar sites.

Jennifer Brady’s practice involves video and sound installation. Her video works fuse documentary and fictive modes of production, with particular emphasis given to the element of storytelling within them. The stories she tells through her video works are based on research into both real and fictive events. This material is often used to construct narratives which in turn explore such notions of reality and fiction.

She is currently completing a M.A in Visual Arts Practice (IADT). Selected recent exhibitions include Public Gesture: Pirate Capital, The Lab, Dublin 2010; Flicks: The Cinematic in Art curated by Cliodhna Shaffrey, Drogheda (2009), Sounds Like Art curated by Carissa Farrell, Draíocht (2009) and the Claremorris Open Exhibition (2007) where she was a prizewinner. She was commissioned to produce new video work for multi media event Snakes and Ladders (Dublin, Wexford and New York), curated by composer Daniel Figgis (2009). Her work has also been purchased for the Bank of Ireland Art Collection.

Niamh Heery - Bulk

126 presents:

Bulk
Niamh Heery

October 8th through October 30th, 2010
Opening reception: Thursday October 7th, 7-9pm

Artist talk: Thursday October 7th, 6:30pm

Bulk is a body of video, photography and sculptural work resulting from the artist’s investigation into the logistics of consumerism and capitalism. During April and May 2010, the artist embarked on a 24 day transatlantic voyage on a freighter ship from Buenos Aires to London. Stopping at six different commercial ports in Latin America, Africa and Europe, she observed with great detail the routine processes and bulk operations that define modern industry and commodity culture today.

In a time of economic uncertainty, the cyclical process of cargo shipping is still a constant. Steel containers provide anonymity and conceal the items inside. Identical containers pack the docks and vessels with goods that are constantly hidden from view. Bulk explores the homogenized, anonymous steel domain that is the working port and invokes the idea of the double to portray the sense of overwhelming and sublime that one is met with when a system of commodity culture is revealed.

Niamh Heery b. 1983 is a multimedia artist from Dublin, Ireland. She graduated from IT Tallaght in 2004 with a Higher Diploma in Audio Visual Media. In the following years she went on to work in the area of contemporary music and media production and had films screened at festivals around Europe. In 2009 she graduated with a BA in Visual Arts Practice at IADT, Dun Laoghaire, specializing in multimedia installation. She spent the following year completing work in Toronto and Buenos Aires. Niamh is currently enrolled as an MA student in the Huston School of Film, NUI Galway. Her work has been exhibited in Ireland, France, Canada and the USA.

Who dares this pair of boots displace?

126 presents:

Who dares this pair of boots displace?

Steve Maher, Fiona Hession,Tadhg McCullagh, Anne O’Byrne, Aidan Kelleher and Brendan Hoare.

September 10th - October 2nd, 2010

Opening reception:Thursday September 9th, 7-9pm

Who dares this pair of boots displace? a show by six recent graduates from Galway & Mayo Institute of Technology and Limerick School of Art and Design. The new works, responding to the theme displaced, include drawing, sculpture and video. Considering their recent transition this exhibition provides a platform for new processes, dialogue and interaction.

Steve Maher is a graduate of Limerick School of Art and Design and is a member of the artist partnership ”Like Studio” in Limerick city. His work is based around performance, sculpture and drawing. Maher considers that within the enculturation endured through the formative years of life, there exists a duality in how individuals are taught to interpret their immediate environment.

Fiona Hession, a GMIT graduate, is a Galway Based Visual Artist. Her work to date has focused on the various face of “Home” in modern society and what this term means on a personal level. Hession uses a variety of disciplines such as sculpture, print and textiles to inform her work. In this new work she has endeavoured to look beyond the traditional concept of her own home and try to understand the emotional trauma of being displaced on a much larger level.

Tadhg McCullagh studied painting at Limerick School of Art and Design. Who me? Yes you. Not me! Couldn’t be! Then who? presents moments where the instrumental attitudes that are dominant in our society can be, at least momentarily, set aside. The cogs are given a chance to turn alternatively allowing an opportunity for reflection on the system as a whole to take place. Tadhg’s practice is informed mainly by sociological studies and how these issues can be represented through art.

Anne O’Byrne studied at the Limerick College of Art and most recently at GMIT. O’Byrne’s work focuses on the engagement and observation of the mundane and the banal. Things we see in front of us every day, things we work with and places we live in are all subjects of her analysis. Working with her deep interest in all things aeronautical with conceptual ideas of construction, O’Byrne toys with the physical entity of a ‘Displaced Threshold’. The body of work consists of 4 works on paper, 3 works on gessoed board, a video piece approx. 9 mins, and a constructional piece.

Aidan Kelleher received a B.A in Fine Art Printmaking from Limerick School of Art and Design and is a member of Limerick Printmakers. Aidan’s practice studies the use of devices with which a viewer can interact. For 126 Aidan created a machine designed to evoke an emotional response. “Fear”was conceived by first researching an accurate definition of what fear meant and researching different ways that people could be agitated by the presence of danger. To create the feeling of and the image of this fear, two electrodes were attached to the controllers which are set to randomly administer an electric shock. A sense of danger and tension is generated.

Brendan Hoare completed a degree in Fine Art in GMIT, Galway. In the work created for this show, Hoare suggests we are programmed to perceive identity in ourselves. This identity is a mask which allows us to interact and function socially. We are in fact a collection of perceptions which succeed each other with great rapidity and are in perpetual movement. Memory, which is basis of identity, is constituted of a collection of these disjointed fragmentary episodes. The unified, continuous self is an illusion. The inner life is too subtle and transient to be known to itself.