Response Room: Louise Butler

Exhibition Information

Response Room

March 16 – April 9 2009

Talbot Gallery 51 Talbot Street Dublin1. Tel/Fax: 01 8556599

Email: info@talbotgallery.com www.talbotgallery.com

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Friday 10.30am – 5.00pm Saturday 10.30am – 2.00pm

Four Dublin based practitioners from a spectrum of disciplines, have been allocated a space within the gallery. Using a thematic framework each artist is asked to respond to a line of enquiry that interests them. The work is carried out in the gallery space over a specific period of time.

The purpose of the Response Room is to ask questions about how visual art is made.

The work will challenge the notion of working outside the traditional studio environment. How will the practitioners work with a mix of creative practices and collaborations? What is the form of interaction with audience? What are the alignments between the artists, the gallery and audience.

This blog functions as a place where artists can interact with each other and also where the public can comment and interact with the artwork at various stages.

Closure Night Response Room

Thursday evening 9^th of April 2009

Closure night for response room could have been a solemn affair (for those Catholics among us, as it was Holy Thursday) but no there was no keeping the art vultures at home they were out in their droves. What a great finale to a really impressive show all the hard work over the last four weeks paid off as the response to the show was overwhelmingly positive. As always at Talbot Gallery openings there were familiar faces from the Dublin art scene but there was a definite International flavour to the evening and a few nods from the whose who. After the wine had been well and truly drank the evening continued on downstairs in Grainger’s bar where I’m sure art, recession and God were discussed right into Good Friday

Louise Butler

Louise Butler’s investigations of her surrounding landscape, from her locality, to lands further a field, makes her more aware of the human interventions that are marking the landscape. The idea that nature has become mediated by tourist attractions, explaining where the best places to experience nature from, thus turning the wilderness into an object to be consumed. Louise graduated from NCAD in 2006 and has exhibited extensively since graduation.

Louise's statement for Response Room:

“The topography of the landscapes comes through personal memory and through my idealised dreamlike worlds, which I have gathered from places of my interest and tourist attactions. Starting out in the Response Room there was no intial plan, creating a more organic process with the work, as each piece leads into the next.

The practice easily flows between 2D and 3D work, although painting is at the foreground, becoming the starting point of this project.

Monumental mountains, islands and forests have emerged in the space, using synthetic materials, styrofoam, plastics and polystyrene…

As the more controlling human presence is telling us what we should want from nature, the more we want the pure untouched ‘original’ version of nature.”

Clare Henderson

Clare Henderson creates muted coloured and black and white etchings, dry points, lithographs, pencil drawings and paintings of animals, humans and the man-made world to evoke existential elements which she believes are inherent in us all. The gesture of a pose has become very important to Clare. She uses the figure as if she were directing these characters as players on a stage. Drawing inspiration from themes present in theatre and literature, Clare is interested in the work of Samuel Beckett, Paul Auster and Don DeLillo’s short novel 'The Body Artist'.

Clare's statement for Response Room:

"I have been working on ideas of innovative transportation and themes of social connection. I am at present making a shadow theatre which displays a cable car moving across the ocean. The lamp, which projects coloured shadows onto a japanese paper screen, is powered by the sun and the cable car moves across the screen by a combination of weights and pulleys. It is therefore a totally self sufficiently powered installation.

The shadow theatre displays the only cable car in Europe which connects an island to a larger landmass, Dursey Island Cable Car in west Cork. The now uninhabited island is situated in a remote area and is near impossible to get to by public transport."

Joe Stanley

Joe Stanley graduated in Fine Art, Sculpture, from the National College of Art & Design, in1994.

He draws his inspiration from his fascination with architectural structure and spaces. His works fuse photographic and mental architectural forms with a high emphasis on Composition and line.

He has exhibited in Royal Hibernian Academy, Temple Bar Gallery, Talbot Gallery, and The Project Gallery, Dublin, The Barbara Stanley Gallery, London. Also in Luxembourg, Paris, Brussels and Aberdeen Scotland. He is in numerous public and private collections worldwide.

Joe's statement for Response Room:

"The concept was to create a site-specific inflatable work, in relation to the existing space that was provided by the gallery.

Choosing the materials was an integral part of the creative process. Employing improvised Do-It-Yourself construction techniques that the sculpture was made from, cheap, commercially available materials, found in any builder-providers.

Although the construction was formed, from the dimensions of the space, as the work was gently inflated, it gradually found its own form, clinging to the walls as it rose. When fully inflated, a direct relationship between the sculpture and the architecture, a tension and strain developed. It was the culmination of these two, which brings the work into being. It was this action / re-action that was interesting within the process."

Barbara Vasic

Barbara Vasic’s work almost always begins with the mind-body-space relationship and usually evolves through drawing. Often it becomes some sort of rendering of that space which could almost be called, a “portrait” of the space, but under the surface of the visible, the universal parameter of all space emerges. Layers of perceived or imagined meaning cover up the emptiness, Strong structures defy the transparent surfaces that disappear layer by layer, but even they end up as a mere arabesques within the vast space beyond.

Response Room

Exhibition Information

Closure Night Response Room

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Louise Butler

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