Remote Joy
The stimulus to curate and to host Remote Joy is to maintain business, to show that art continues to be created, even in these trying and frightening times. It is to inspire and to provoke thought and pleasure through the continued enjoyment of the art being made by our artists, even in these restricting times, when most of us are working from home and some artists are locked out of their studios. Remote Joy aims to bring some joy and art right into your homes for the duration of this exhibition where, at the touch of a few buttons, you can see new art that is being made because of or despite the uncertain conditions that prevail globally. In fact, this exhibition shows that in many ways the pandemic Covid-19 can bring us closer together. It can also give us more time to contemplate and to savour the important and challenging things in our lives, including new art. The exhibition is partly remote. It is partly joyful. It is sometimes both.
Featuring new work by Alan Butler, Aoife Shanahan, Caroline McCarthy, Constant Dullaart, Damien Flood, David O’Reilly, Fergus Martin, John Graham, Kirstin Arndt, Mark Joyce and Ronan McCrea.
-Jerome O’Drisceoil, Director of Green on Red Gallery
See online review: http://papervisualart.com/tag/remote-joy/
Exhibition Curator: Jerome O’Drisceoil
Exhibition Coordinator: Ashley Peterson
Alan Butler
NXGIMGROUNDCOVER06, PROPAGAVELEAVES01 and Thistle01_D are the titles and filenames of three unique prints from Alan Butler’s ongoing Virtual Botany Cyanotypes series in which he uses the process of cyanotype photography to catalogue and document specimens of fictitious plants from video games and virtual reality environments. The antiquated and scientific associations of early cyanotype photography imbue Butler’s work with a sense of authority and credibility, which is then contradicted by the modern, digital-like text beneath the images. These file-referencing titles break the illusion of scientific documentation to reveal the reality of these plants - that they do not exist in reality at all. By using one of the earliest forms of photographic rendering to explore the newest iterations of digital environments, Butler’s work proposes a new relationship between reality and fiction, alive and artificial, and asks us to consider our relationship to technology.
Butler’s own thoughts about his Virtual Botany Cyanotypes series (2016-Present) and its aims are expressed in the project’s statement-
“Taking their form from the well known collection of 'Cyanotypes of British Algae', produced by Anna Atkins (1799-1871) in the 19th Century, these works explore various types of plant life that live inside video games and virtual reality environments. Through performative and procedural explorations inside video games, as well as their file-structures, virtual plant life is identified and extracted, and then transposed to positive exposure film. The images of virtual plants, grasses, shrubs, trees and weeds are then exposed through real sunlight onto photosensitive paper, which is prepared by hand using the original 19th Century process.
The result is a series of [unique] works that allow virtual imagery to merge with real-world physical materiality. The surfaces of these images record both jpeg artefacts, as well as blemishes and scars which result from the handmade [hand-washing] production process. Each work is unique as the transparency film used in the exposure process is destroyed after the work is complete.”
Alan Butler, 2018
The National Gallery of Ireland purchased in May 2020 Butler’s unique cyanotype, CORN_SIMPLE_DRY (2018) for their permanent collection.
Aoife Shanahan
Works by Aoife Shanahan include a photograph from her Distorted Perception (2015) series, two photographs from her recent Within the Shadows (2015) project, and six works from her new series entitled Bio Trace (2020). While Shanahan’s Distorted Perception and Within the Shadows photographs were created prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, both series explore themes of isolation and disconnection, which have become particularly poignant as the world continues to experience unprecedented and indefinite social distancing measures, which are undoubtedly impacting the way humans navigate social landscapes. Shanahan’s work in Bio Trace directly confronts the Covid-19 pandemic and its invisible yet powerful effects on social dynamics and physical health. See the artist’s statements about her work below.
We are delighted that The National Gallery of Ireland has recently acquired a few examples of Shanahan’s work, purchasing one copy of four Within the Shadows works, Stolen Moment (2015), Anticipation (2015), Glint (2015), and Tangent (2015) and also one copy of Distorted Perception #6 (featured in Remote Joy).
Within the Shadows (2015)
“Anonymous dwellers glide through beams of stark light and impenetrable shadow. The dark shadows fragment and isolate the lone figure. The scene is set and there is an edge of uncertainty, a palpable sense of anticipation intermingled with disquiet. “Within the Shadows” is a response to being submerged in a new environment and the work functions as a metaphor for the constant flux of modern living. While it is sometimes hard to ignore the alienation and disconnect often experienced in an urban setting, there are also rare moments of tranquillity. The city becomes centre stage, transferring from a physical space into a psychological one. The lone figure becomes an intriguing character within this space, challenging us to call upon our imagination, fears and fantasies to create new narratives, ones where hope prevails and anxiety fades.”
Aoife Shanahan, 2020
Bio Trace (May, 2020)
“In 2020, Covid-19 spread across the world with devastating effects. The resulting pandemic has not only led to an unprecedented global health and economic crisis, it has significantly changed the way we live. It’s almost incomprehensible that a virus, invisible to the naked eye, can leave its trace in such a significant way.
Micro-organisms are all around us, but their activity mostly goes unnoticed. This work is a series of biograms which attempt to visually represent this on-going activity and make a permanent record of their presence. A piece of film is exposed to a source of bacteria and stored in a cool, dark place for a number of weeks. The bacteria feed on the film’s silver gelatin emulsion, destabilizing it. As the culture grows, it consumes the gelatin as a food source and liberates silver particles into abstract patterns. Eventually the bacteria die and no more changes occur. The film is scanned, a permanent record of their activity.”
Aoife Shanahan, 2020
Caroline McCarthy
The following works by Caroline McCarthy are new artworks that were made during the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, which have been in effect in Ireland since March. Like many artists, McCarthy has had to adjust her artistic practice in response to the lockdown restrictions and created these works in her newly adapted studio in Dundalk, Co. Louth. McCarthy’s work often explores the nature of representation, consumerism, visual hierarchy and ideas of value and taste. Together Forever is an ongoing series that considers notions of value and taste inherent in the surface of everyday objects, images and modes of display. The series is positioned in response to a culture of mass production, where every kind of experience, fantasy or sense of one’s place in the world is pre-determined through some form of packaging, the work employs humour and other strategies of intervention to investigate the space between ideological facade and the concrete materiality of things. Each work in the Together Forever series features various combinations of the same set of colourful plastic straws; by using the same straws throughout the series, McCarthy simultaneously gestures to both the disposability and permanence of plastic straws.
Speaking more to the nature of Mcarthy’s work, Jerome O’Drisceoil has written, '“Style, of course, and design are central to McCarthy’s art. Her art is as much about signs and signifiers as it is about ink and gouache on paper. ‘A sly critique on consumption’ is how one critic described McCarthy’s modus operandi. It is that. It is also exuberant, joyful, funny, life-affirming. It is never pompous, grandiose though her work makes several nods to art history and to precursors like Piet Mondrian, even to Bridget Riley’s iconic use of the stripe. But McCarthy takes down those towering forbearers with humour and wit and with her ‘dishevelled formalism’. She challenges the gravitas of the whole of Dutch 17th Century Baroque metaphysical painting that holds pride of place in all our museums. Her work is a celebration of the consumption of art for art sake. Her work is USELESS. Often the art is invisible, intangible, played down but stays with you like a hanging question mark, a niggling feeling that you have been given a sign, not an answer, and a broad smile.”
“Together Forever is a series of ink and gouache drawings of the same drinking straws, their colour and casual arrangement evoking a kind of dishevelled formalism, their disposability made permanent through the medium of their execution with exquisite attention to detail. Together Forever is the joyful expression at a hedonistic party, a celebration drunk on colour and excess with no thought for the headache which comes tomorrow.”
Constant Dullaart
Green On Red Gallery is pleased to present work by Dutch artist Constant Dullaart for the first time in our gallery. Dullaart provided us with three works for Remote Joy, each of which exemplify his pioneering and ever-evolving, digital art practice. Although digital and online art has been a part of Dullaart’s oeuvre for years, his work seems to take on even greater purpose and significance in 2020 as the world has become more reliant on technology than ever. Each of the following three works, detour.world, ad hominem and Generic Emotional Downpour are interactive webpages, presented below as gifs, that can be visited using the links below Dullaart’s work. These artworks propose a new relationship between artist, art and audience and hint, using both humour and precise intention, at the boundless possibilities for the burgeoning era of digital art.
detour.world (2020), made by Constant Dullaart in the last weeks, is made for your screen and gives you options and a kind of virtual control that anxiously mirrors life in this digital age of surveillance and voluntary or involuntary data sharing.
“Detour World contains the tactility of a digital map, nostalgically planning a route we have travelled before. With restricted international travel because of the COVID-19 pandemic, these dreams of walking the planet take place in a different light. The default route is set to Mark Zuckerberg’s daily commute as suggested by Google Maps. While Facebook and Google discuss making user data available to combat an infectious disease, the bright technological future fades like an old photograph. With each browser rendering this trip differently, we encourage you to travel your own route through memories of when the world seemed open and at your fingertips, while in lockdown.”
Constant Dullaart
May 2020
While the above works by Dullaart are presented in gif format for your viewing, each of these works are interactive webpages that you can visit and explore.
To visit detour.world click this link- https://detour.world
To visit ad hominem click this link- http://adhominem.xyz/
To visit Generic Emotional Downpour click this link- https://constantdullaart.com/emoji-rain/
Damien Flood
The following four pieces by Damien Flood are examples of his recent work which continues to investigate his interests in early writings on philosophy, theology, alchemy and the natural sciences. His art uses these fields as starting points to explore the mutability of reality and language.
Green On Red Gallery director and Remote Joy curator, Jerome O’Drisceoil, speaks more to the interpretations within Flood’s work by saying,
“The paintings he creates balance somewhere between landscape and figuration. They are psychological portraits and maps to different worlds. Flood is interested in creating a duality in his imagery, exploring how one image can contain multiple meanings and readings. Most recently Flood has begun making cermic works in the form of figures and vases. They expand on his interest in how we see and read the world, sometimes in a more direct and humourous way.
A primary concern in Flood’s paintings is how we see and read the world around us. Using a gestural and intuitive line, he creates images that relay his experience of the places he visits and the people he meets. The influences in Flood’s paintings are wide- ranging from collecting oral histories of small coastal towns to research trips to deserts in Dubai and Sharjah. During these periods of research he leaves himself open to the experiences that present themselves, allowing one meeting to lead to another.
Flood’s paintings create a re-imaging of the world by merging the stories, experiences and memories through the medium of paint. Puzzles, mysteries and questions are presented, through a mixing of different languages and view points, to create a place for meditative reflection. The images Flood produces mix the universal and the personal, the grand and the absurd. They try to communicate something that escapes written word; something that is experienced and felt.”
“[Flood’s paintings] are questing experiments in achieving such transformative, destabilizing encounters. There is ‘rupture’; there are ‘cuts’ and there is a necessary commitment to ‘mutation’. These paintings are the vigorous outcomes of urgent, intense imaginative processes, and the products of a insistently independent artistic spirit.”
David O’Reilly
David O’Reilly is an Irish artist, film-maker and game designer based in LA whose distinctive style has made him one of the most respected and influential creative voices with new virtual technologies. Creator of the groundbreaking animated films Please Say Something and The External World, his work has won numerous awards and been the subject of several retrospectives internationally. He served as writer for the television shows Adventure Time & South Park, and created the fictional video games in Spike Jonze’s Academy Award winning film Her. His recent interactive works Mountain (2014) and Everything (2017) blur the boundaries between art, games and philosophy and have received widespread acclaim. Everything became the first video game to be eligible for an Academy Award. David's works have also exhibited and screened at Berlin Art Week, Centre Pompidou, SFMOMA and Shenzhen Animation Biennale.
For Remote Joy, O’Reilly has contributed Quarantine Dreams (2020), a short film that combines the accounts of people detailing their strange dream experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to create the film, O’Reilly provided a phone number for anyone who wanted to contribute to the project to call and leave an anonymous voicemail describing some of the dreams they had during the pandemic. The resulting film is a hypnotic and somewhat unsettling journey that acts as both a window into each participant’s individual subconscious fears and also as a record of this shared global trauma, which continues to affect our daily lives. Though undoubtedly eerie, Quarantine Dreams also reminds us of the interconnectivity between humans as we all experience similar changes in our lives - and in our dreams. While the Covid-19 pandemic has physically distanced us in many ways, our shared experiences and reactions are bringing us closer emotionally. In a strange twist of circumstance therefore, Quarantine Dreams offers solace in togetherness. It is one of three C*rona Voicemail new artworks by O'Reilly, including Staying at Home (2020) and Sudden Black Hole (2020).
O'Reilly's, by now familiar, hi-res, super-saturated visuals seem to jump into our space putting extreme pressure on the screen to contain and to withhold this intense visual activity. The synchronicity of sound and image is managed with masterful versatility and fluency. Your computer screen seems a natural home for these lurid and lucid dreamscapes. With O'Reilly your flat screen becomes an extraordinary canvas for new moving virtual experiences.
David O’Reilly, Quarantine Dreams, 2020, short film, 4k 60fps, 11:08 minutes
Fergus Martin
Fergus Martin makes use of the world around him as a source for his paintings, sculpture and photographs. His work reflects things seen or even fleeting moments from the everyday. The geometric forms that consistently appear in his work give shape to his preoccupation with space, form and materials. Each work will initiate its own time and space while always having a sense of movement, of going on. Pompier Rouge and Nero Profondo are two recent works by Martin that continue to answer his artistic questions about the convergence of space, form and energy.
Two of Martin’s recent artworks, Screw Protruding Tubes (2019) and Nero Profondo (included in Remote Joy and pictured below), recently featured in the IMMA exhibition Then and Now. Speaking about the two sculptures, art critic and curator Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith wrote the following-
“Both works derive much of their power from the sense of contained density and stored energy exuded by their thin cylinders of darkly gleaming, non-traditional sculptural material with convex ends, which hug the gallery walls….these two works are set some distance apart, accentuating their disparity and suggesting the passage of time and a process of gradual elaboration such as might be deemed fitting for an exhibition presented under the aegis of Then and Now. And yet, this preliminary perception is undermined by the works' dates – both 2019, fresh from the studio – as well as the suggestion of temporal reversal in the fact that the modular Screw Protruding Tubes is effectively composed of fifteen closely aligned clones of the singular Nero Profundo. Rather than imagine the first of these works as an expansion of the second, what is evoked is a process of ultimate concentration. This intimation is apt. In spite of the considerable diversification of Fergus Martin's interests in an expanding range of media over the past quarter of a century, this sense of concentration seems absolutely true to his work's underlying and animating aesthetic.”
John Graham
John Graham’s diverse practice has its foundation in drawing and printmaking. In his current works on paper and canvas configurations of closely ruled, overlapping lines form dense, monochromatic or subdued colour fields. Comparable to weaving’s warp and weft, these linear surfaces hover somewhere between a reticent muteness and an atmosphere that is more open and resonant. Graham’s contributions to Remote Joy were all made during the Covid-19 pandemic. Though similar to previous works in this series, the new drawings have a more neutral tone; as though responsive to the uncertainties inherent in our current situation. The titles seem significant too, named after the day they were completed, each work becomes a record of the artist’s activity at that time. As days have grown exponentially formless in recent weeks, Graham’s resolute and precisely organised drawings tap into a sense of comforting normality.
The artist writes – “They feel reticent to me, less graphically assertive than my ink drawings. Despite a relatively mechanical application the pencil remains a sensitive instrument, producing lines that are nuanced according to their weight, duration, direction and speed. I like the touch of the pencil, its softer application, and how it gradually disappears as you use it. At the moment these things feel important. Small additions along the drawing margins seem to suggest a more complex or three-dimensional structure unfolding.” John Graham, 2020
Kirstin Arndt
These two series by Kirstin Arndt explore her continued fascination with combination, placement and transformation. Like much of Arndt's work, the meanings behind these sculptural pieces are transitory and rely on their specific installation, which can be chosen and altered by the viewer. As with Arndt’s other works, these series respond to the architecture of the space and question the relationships between dimension and surfaces. Arndt's preferred media primarily consists of household items and industrial materials, which she then physically manipulates through a number of different techniques in order to inscribe new layers of meaning. Curator Dr. Maria Müller-Schareck, discusses the overlap between industrial and artistic aesthetics in Arndt’s work by saying-
“Everything is built on the basic elements of artistic form: line; surface; colour. Once the form is transposed into the location, this becomes the area of reference, along with its associated walls, ceiling and floor. The lines are poles or bars made of wood or aluminium; there are plastic strips or even neon tubes, yarns, cables, ropes and cords. Surfaces take the form of rigid or flexible materials, metal plates or sheet metal, paper, wooden boards and roof panels, PVC tarpaulin, packaging materials, layers of foam, painters’ felt or fleece blankets. These products were developed outside of the artistic world and are able to enrich the latter with their particular qualities. Kirstin Arndt will often use the colours available from production in industry – she prefers black, metallic shades, a light blue, a powerful orange – or she gets professionals to spray the surfaces according to her instructions.”
The above images illustrate some of the myriad of combinations that are possible when hanging two of the five different pieces together
“Kirstin Arndt’s works are approachable, not just physically, but also because the materials are familiar to us in our daily life, because we can see ourselves reflected in them either actually or figuratively, and because they stir up associations and they evoke moods. ”
Mark Joyce
Mark Joyce’s recent work masterfully manipulates the constraints of colour, line and light to explore the convergence of science and aesthetics. The paintings Colour Seeking Form (for lasting relationship) (left) and Edison (Interior) (right) featured in Joyce’s recent solo exhibition at Green on Red Gallery, Solas Salach (Fall 2018), which confronted the anomalies and phenomenological strangeness of our optical experience. Joyce’s improvised compositions on either raw linen or canvas explored light as a physical entity. The artist’s motifs are drawn from scientific and philosophical models, but without that vantage point or privileged field of vision. The works explore the glitches and gaps in our “enlightenment”. With titles in the series such as Dirty Neon (2018) and Edison, these paintings refer to an urban light, that violent electrical discharge which passes through the aethers to keep out the ancient darkness. By maintaining a tension between surface materiality and pictorial illusion, the relationship between colour, form and group appear as both established and in a continuous and dissonant flux.
Ronan McCrea
Remote Joy concludes with four new works by Ronan McCrea, which come from his recent Study for Projection series. The following text is McCrea’s statement about the project and his experience working amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I’m having vivid coronavirus dreams. Apparently it’s a thing. The other night I dreamt I was planning an exhibition – in an actual physical gallery space. I was so happy and excited. Then I woke up.
In one way or another, projection has been a consistent concern in my practice for over twenty-five years, most obviously starting with the 1994 installation Projective Techniques. A ‘concern’- yes, but it’s a more than that. I also love it, I never stop finding it a little thrilling. Projection is bound up in pleasures and pain of light, architecture, place and immersion that are also bound into specific modes of spectatorship premised on collective (physical!) viewing experiences.
For a brief period in the 2000s the projected image formed a genre of sorts, from Round Table discussions in October Magazine to curatorial work of Chrissie Illes and Documenta 11. Good times.
Anyway, the works from the Study for Projection series presented in Remote Joy exhibition are not projections. Apart from two GIFs developed especially for the on-line platform, the works are – or will be - material objects in the form of glossy photographic prints in frames of wood and glass. They are, however about projection, featuring some of my ad-hoc collection of lamps for various film and slide projectors. As objects I find them both beautiful, industrial and completely prosaic, like what photography used to be. The design of the packaging is colourful and bold.
I photographed the lamps and packaging on 6x7cm colour negatives in the studio in an approximation of a ‘product photography’ style against chroma green and blue backgrounds, which are designed for chroma-key compositing. The hands belong to Roberta Meckauskaite whose nails are also painted chroma blue. After scanning the negatives the images are subjected to digital processes of montage, layering and inversion.”
Ronan McCrea
May 2020