Alice Maher

Journey to the End of the Night
Takehito Koganezawa, Alice Maher, Michael Muller, Niamh O'Malley and Clare Rojas

Journey to the End of the Night focuses on the drawings of five artists. Takehito Koganezawa, Alice Maher, Michael Müller, Niamh O’Malley, Clare E. Rojas. The title is taken from the first novel of Louis-Ferdinand Céline written in 1932. This exhibition creates a narrative thread where the viewer is transported to alternate worlds although far removed from the author’s dark, nihilistic meanderings. The artists through their work create fictional spaces and characters that transgress the real and mundane and deal with man’s relation to nature both mythologically and philosophically. The over-riding connection between these works is the capacity to imagine.

Takehito Koganezawa’s drawings invoke a surrealist mood - and though surrealist, the artist maintains a light, humorous edge throughout. His drawings intentionally transform our visual surroundings through his animistic approach to his subjects.

Alice Maher’s series of drawings The Trials of a Driad explore a forgotten mythology and culture. Driads are a type of wood nymph in Greek mythology, viewed as female spirits of nature. The drawings of these fantastical characters align themselves with contemporary game figures connecting stories and popular culture through time.

Michael Müller’s works are based around linguistics and philosophical explorations of the nature of being and existence. His drawing Jetzt, Teil IV (Now part IV) depicts a cloudscape that alludes to infinity… what is beyond.

Niamh O’Malley’s Blind Spot series reflect her continuing exploration with illusion and the division between the real and the unreal. The landscape drawings are both familiar and fantastical with the inclusion of ellipses of colour that lead the viewer’s eye.

Clare E. Roja’s small, knowingly naïve works straddle both a primitive nostalgia and our current culture as characters appear and reappear in different fantasies: women and men, and women and animals connect in both quiet and charged moments.

"There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious." David Hume

Niamh O'Malley