16 July to 14 August
Lismore Castle Arts in collaboration with 126 Gallery presents: Naheed Raza - Sand
Lismore Castle Arts: St Carthage Hall, Chapel Street, Lismore, Co. Waterford
Exhibition runs: 16 July to 14 August 2011, open Saturdays and Sundays 2 - 5pm
Launch: Saturday 16 July at 2pm
Lismore Castle Arts: St Carthage Hall is a new offsite project space in a former Victorian church hall. For 2011 Lismore Castle Arts has invited several artists and artist-led projects to curate an exhibition to coincide with the Still Life exhibition at the main gallery. Naheed Raza - Sand, curated by 126 Gallery, was recorded at the edge of The Empty Quarter in the United Arab Emirates, and is a meditation on the strange, silent power of the desert. The transience, mobility and immersive quality of the shifting sand acts as a metaphor not only for time but also relates to thresholds of seeing, thinking and being.
Naheed Raza (b. 1980, UK) is an artist whose practice explores the tension between appearance and reality, and the elusive, often ambiguous nature of experience. Recent films have been exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, Edinburgh Film Festival, Bloomberg SPACE and the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Naheed is currently living and working in Edinburgh and holds a MA Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.
126 Gallery is Galway's and the west of Ireland’s first artist-led exhibition space. 126 was established in 2006 by local artists in their own living room as a response to the urgent need for more non-commercial gallery spaces in Galway. In the last ten years a diverse and internationally significant visual arts scene has emerged in Ireland. It is in this development that 126 plays an important role as the only permanent space in Galway that allows artists to experiment and take risks with their practice. Locating to a white-cube space, 126 invited local artists to form a Board based on the successful democratic style of Catalyst (Belfast) and Transmission (Glasgow). In 2009, 126 relocated to a larger, more prominent space on Queen Street in the city centre.
Lismore Castle Arts, a not-for-profit initiative, was founded in 2005 with the aim of presenting and promoting internationally significant contemporary art to audiences in Ireland and beyond. The main gallery hosts one exhibition, of work by leading international artists, per year. Lismore Castle Arts: St Carthage Hall, a new venture for 2011, is sited in the town of Lismore and will be open every weekend from April to September.