Context Galleries

presents

Aideen Doran

Alyson Edgar

Fergal McSwiggan

Curated by Emma Donaldson

Derry? London? London? Derry?

Opening 8pm Saturday 5th April 2008

The Exhibition will run until 3rd May 2008

Aideen Doran

Two cities built upon a stratified clutter of histories... like Leonias rubbish, the boundaries between these places uncertain, shifting, threatening an avalanche. An unstable line, drawn from the centre (London) to the periphery (Derry)- a fragmenting sense of place- London Street, on the margin of the walled city. Drawing/ erasing/ over-writing/ re-drawing/ recovering/ constructing...The linear time of labour involved in these processes condenses into seconds of film, looping and folding back upon its volume. Entropy parallels renewal. Macro/micro histories, local/national scales conflated. Provisional monuments, provided for uncertain places.Representing the space - constructing a removal from itThe hand-made, hand drawn suggest vernacular means of managing the politics of space, translating these histories into the everyday life, the invisible into the visible.Ordering/ mapping/ describing/ navigating...These complex relationships become a web of information, collapsing under its own gravity.

Aideen Doran graduated from the University of Ulster, Belfast in 2007. Previous shows include RDS Student Art Awards, Dublin (2006), Heal, Naughton Gallery, Belfast (2007) and EV+A 2008; Too Early for Vacation, Limerick. She currently lives in Belfast, working at Flax Art Studios as part of their Graduating Student Residency programme.

Alyson Edgar

I am an artist working on an exhibition for the Context Gallery entitled “Derry/ London – London/ Derry?”, which will be shown in the Orchard Gallery space at the beginning on April.
I am interested in discovering alternative ways by which to map a landscape. In this forthcoming exhibition I intend to study the map/ route patterns that surround London Street, patterns made by those who use the street most.
I would greatly appreciate your participation. All the information gathered from collaborations will become the installed art in the gallery.
Initially I would appreciate it if you could write only your home postcode on the back of this card. This would be the postcode from which you commute to London Street. Please retain both this card and its envelope as they will be displayed in the gallery as part of the work.
Kind regards and many thanks in advance!
Hope to speak to you soon,
Alyson Edgar.
edgar.a@hotmail.co.uk
07980553343


Born in Belfast, N. Ireland Alyson Edgar creates work that focuses on the visualisation and cartographic documentation of journeys.
Unfamiliar landscapes are logged and archived in an interactive and collaborative manner, utilising elements of serendipity and voyeurism.
Her work is presented in a structured pseudo-scientific format cataloguing the events of each investigation.

Bio details:
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1985. Graduated with BA Hons in Fine and Applied Art: Installation/ Sculpture, from University of Ulster: Belfast, 2007.
Selected exhibitions : “Claremorris Open Exhibition”, Co. Mayo 2007. “Energy in Art” Phoenix Gas Headquarters, Belfast 2004.
Publications : Degree Shows: Critics Choices - CIRCA, Issue 121; Claremorris Open Exhibition Catalogue 2007; Perspective 2004 – ‘Arts Review’.

Fergal McSwiggan

Ulster Wayward

Why go outside? What is there to do? Public spaces in Northern Ireland. Rural, urban and suburban. How they are occupied, how they are abandoned, how they are desirable and undesirable. Public interaction with self and environment. London St in Derry/Londonderry, Gerry/Londongerry. What do we do now with our open spaces, on a Saturday night in Belfast or Derry, or on a Wednesday afternoon in Omagh or Strabane? Open public spaces were used for many different activities during the troubles, what are they used for now? A walk through the Lagan Meadows, or a walk along the Derry walls. A drive through the South Sperrins scenic route, or through the North-West Passage. Camping out in Belvoir Park, or camping on London street. Walking the Ulster Wayward.

Fergal McSwiggan lives in Belfast and works and recreates here and all over Ireland. Originally from Omagh, County Tyrone, his work is concerned with issues of communication, place and identity, tourism and recreation, as well as rural and urban public space in post-conflict Northern Ireland. He is interested in the misrepresented visual culture of Northern Ireland, and how it was in the past, often seen as urban and violent, when it is predominantly pastoral and peaceful.

Context 'We the People...' Outreach Show

16th Feb 08 - 22nd Mar 08

Swift Sequential Intimacies

07th Mar 08 @ 8pm

- 15th March 08


Cliona Harmey; Allan Hughes; Paul Murnaghan; Slavek Kwi

Opening 8pm Friday 7th March Main Theatre, St Columb’s Hall

Exhibition runs until 15th March 2008

Opening Hours 11 am - 5pm

Context Galleries presents ‘Swift Sequential Intimacies’ a weeklong exhibition by Cliona Harmey, Allan Hughes, Paul Murnaghan and Slavek Kwi investigating the Main Theatre Space in St. Columb’s Hall using the medium of sound.

Cliona Harmey’s ‘Seating Set’ work takes the form of a series of differently sequenced recordings using the sound of the on site theatre seating. Cliona Harmey is an artist who works across a variety of media including video, photography, sound and the Internet. Much of her work is about the process of recording, particularly small mutable everyday phenomena.She is currently based in Dublin and is a lecturer at The National College of Art & Design, Dublin. She studied Sculpture, graduating in 1992 and has exhibited in curated shows in Ireland and internationally. In 1999- 2000 she completed a one year residency at Arthouse Multimedia Centre, Dublin, which introduced her to working in the area of moving image and sound. She recently completed a multidisciplinary MA in Visual Practices at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology which combines students of curating, writing and art practice. She is also one of the founding members of Blackletter.ie an online open publishing system for artists.

Allan Hughes’ ‘Auditoria’ work sets down somewhere inside a narrative of surveillance and counter-surveillance and begins to negotiate a course through our relationship to the surrounding audio environment. The work consistently makes reference to instances of looking but withholds this privilege from the spectator and instead establishes a system of auditory mise en scené by locating the listener in a series of audio settings (5.1 surround, stereo and mono). This not only locates them in the listening space but works to reproduce other spaces, repositioning their listening experience within the diegesis and the technologies that appear within. The course the work takes, aims to reflect our constantly fluctuating relationship to recording and mediated technologies and their impact on our understanding of events, people and places around us. That despite the promises to “bring us closer” they also function to produce a more precarious and detached subjectivity, maintaining a network that constantly keeps us apart.
Allan Hughes is a board member of Factotum and the Digital Arts Studios at Queen Street. His work has been presented both nationally and internationally, most recently for “Northern Bound” at Sla rosa in Quebec, a solo show at the Old Museum Arts Centre in Belfast and an exhibition in the G126 gallery in Galway. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Ulster entitled “Synchronisation, Authority & Duplicity: Screening The Voice”, where his research focuses on the development of our relationship to synchronised dialogue in cinema and more specifically our production and understanding of the recorded voice and it’s inclination to multiply meaning in the act of listening.

Paul Murnaghan's work Time loss recognition for heat exposure in humans (A sound work composed from the utterances of domestic pets) explores connective phenomena within the psychology of belief. Research within this area has led him to advertise his memory capacity for sale (Memorious - 2006) and to publish a contract in which an art space agreed to commission work that no one would ever see (Auto Da Fe - 2007).
Murnaghan constructs mnemonic devices which act as catalysts towards rendezvous, ritual and installation. Curation is a part of this process and projects rarely happen without other people and the generosity of exchange.With this new composition he uses the communicative powers of domestic pets to examine the telepathy of intense relationships.
Paul Murnaghan is a Dublin based artist and a graduate of the Masters in Visual Arts Practice I.A.D.T. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally and was Artistic Director / curator of 5th Gallery at Guinness Storehouse for its existence (2000-03). Recent work includes 'Synesthesia Sat' which he curated as part of Birr Arts Festival, Co.Offaly. Forthcoming exhibitions include 'A line describing nothings', in May at The Lab, Foley St, Dublin and 'Neocreedo' in August at Platform, Vaasa, Finland.

Slavek Kwi’s new submersive 4D_soundwork ‘Morpheme (Signals from the Outer Zone of Human Perception – Movement 2) on 5.1 system uses recordings of sounds that exist on the periphery of human perception, such as underwater recordings, ultrasound and electromagnetic signals. Composition combines sounds generated from ultrasounds as sonar of bats and echo-location clicks of pink dolphins and other sounds of nocturnal amazon rainforest with signal-sounds from urban environment and inside airplane. The work was created February 2008, Ivy Cottage_Ireland.
Slavek Kwi is explorer, sound-artist and composer fascinated by sound-environments for the last 27 years, creating complex audio-situations mainly from site specific recordings, resulting in digitally frozen contemplations as multi-channel cinema for ears, sound-installations and soundworks designed for CDs. Interested also in free-music research as part of social investigation and employing the space and any objects it contains as musical instrument. His works oscillates between purely sound based and multidisciplinary projects. From the early nineties Slavek has operated under the name Artificial Memory Trace. He has published 11 CD/LP-albums and contributed to numerous international compilations and projects. AMT works are performed, distributed and/or broadcasted across Europe, North America, Australia and Mexico. For details see www.artificialmemorytrace.com

Robert Boyd, Xanadu

Xanadu by Robert Boyd is the first part of the We The People, a series of solo and group exhibitions showcasing the best of contemporary emerging artists from New York, curated by Gregory McCartney, presented in the Context's offsite spaces at St Columbs Hall

Culled from hundreds of hours of archival footage including that of doomsday cults, iconic political figures and global fundamentalist movements, Robert Boyd’s synchronized 4-channel video installation Xanadu tweaks, condenses, and re-frames modern events into seconds-long image bites, representing a history of apocalyptic thought as a series of MTV-style music videos within a setting reminiscent of a discotheque.

Having peaked in the late 70s at a high point of Carter-era optimism, disco was formed from an amalgam of black, Latin, and gay subcultures. Vilified at the time for its seeming promotion of male effeminacy (i.e. homosexuality), its embrace of a proactive female sexuality, and its racial non-distinction, disco, with its voracious capacity to sample and reshape excerpts from multiple musical genres, had the ability to reduce “everything to its surfaces […] so that the profound and the inane have an equal opportunity to stimulate.”* Robert Boyd’s Xanadu exploits the duality that disco provides and combines it with the organizational structure of disco’s visual reincarnation—the music video—to dramatize recent social and political events.

The choice of disco reverses the classic 70s punk vs. disco dichotomy, in which the harbingers of “no future” were clearly the self-disenfranchised punks. In Boyd’s construction, supported by extreme and often violent footage meticulously gathered over the course of several years, we see a current worldview in which mass annihilation and the Apocalypse are solidly in the hands of those empowered by their people. His choice of dance music suggests a volatile segue from the “feel good” generation of the late 70s to the current “feel bad” generation of the 00s. Taken as a whole, the Xanadu videos insinuate that humanity is not apathetic about its own demise but, on the contrary, is furtively engineering it through a form of collective self-destruction.

Introducing the theme of the Apocalypse, Boyd’s video “Heaven’s Little Helper,” 2005, begins with an excerpt from Masada, a 1981 mini-series about the Zealots, a sect of Jews who defended their right to be free from an oppressive Roman regime through an act of mass-suicide. Fast-forwarding into “family” footage of seemingly wholesome hippies and children dancing in natural settings, Boyd marks the end of sunny popular culture in the U.S. with iconic images of the Manson Family. Continuing in this vein, the video incorporates archival footage of some of the most infamous doomsday-cult gurus and their devout disciples including the Hello Kitty-flanked Shoko Asahara of Aum Shinrikyo, architect of the sarin gas attacks on Tokyo subways; the Reverend Jim Jones of the People’s Temple; Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate; and David Koresh of the Branch Davidians.

“Patriot Act,” 2004, takes a global historical sampling of iconic leaders of the Left and Right since World War II to stage a secular milieu of “followers,” insinuating that genocide can take place only through collective effort. The speed of the video accelerates as images of parades and victory celebrations rapidly devolve into images of war and genocide, leading to the video’s cataclysmic end. Edited between views of numbed and orderly masses, startling images of violence and death, both iconic and suppressed, are deployed. Caught in the blur are images of the men who have redefined the political landscape of the world from some of the most pivotal moments in history.

“Judgment Day,” 2006, chronicles the rise of fundamentalist religions around the globe, including audio and video excerpts from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell of the Christian Right in the U.S.; Ian Paisley of Northern Ireland; Islamic fundamentalists Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden, and Ayatollah Khomeini; Daniella Weiss and Eliezer Waldman of Israel’s Gush Eminum; and Hindu nationalists Bal Thackeray and L.K. Advani. The video depicts their desperate, increasingly violent, and sometimes successful attempts at establishing theocracies. Further leveling the terrains of religious and political extremism, “Judgment Day” blurs the already indistinct lines between civil necessity and fanaticism, and the shattering consequences thereof. The video also contains the only original footage in the exhibition, an excerpt from the artist’s own video of the World Trade Center collapse.

The series’ culmination, “Xanadu,” 2006, is a three-channel video that begins with George W. Bush’s post-9/11 address to the nation, in which he declares the end of the “feel good” era and the beginning of a new one. This era, the artist suggests, is Xanadu—a conglomerate of our fears, paranoia, and prejudices—an envisioned Apocalypse in the process of being actualized.

Serving as both the prologue and epilogue for Xanadu, Boyd’s “Exit Strategy,” 2005, features Rapture-ready prophets such as Charles Manson, Brenda McCann of Manson’s Family, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Shoko Asahara and Luc Jouret of the Order of the Solar Temple. Addressing topics such as death, suicide, the President, and the dire state of the world as they perceived it, the video contains audio and video excerpts from some of their final hours, including Jim Jones’ suicide sermon at Jonestown, David Koresh’s 911 call with the FBI, and Marshall Applewhite’s farewell video, among other tragic and telling moments.

By contrasting the familiar and the fringe, the popular and the notorious, Boyd’s Xanadu suggests a displacement between the euphoric idyll promised by disco and the chilling reality of collective human brutality.
( Text by Lia Gangitano )

* Tom Smucker, “Disco: a soundtrack for communal ecstasy,” The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 3rd ed. (New York:Random House, 1992).

Exhibition previews Friday19 October @ 8pm, and runs until 24 November, in St Columbs Hall's old Orchard Gallery space and main theatre

Prehen House Artists

contextgalleries@ prehen house

Context Galleries @ Prehen House

Preview Saturday March 24th 2007 @ 8.30 pm at Prehen House
Simultaneous opening of four solo exhibitions:
John Beattie, Mark Clare, Breda Lynch, Katrina Maguire
Exhibitions runs until Friday 10th August 2007

Prehen House has recently developed as a site for presenting multi-disciplinary arts, with poetry, music, performance and community arts regularly programmed. This Context Galleries project will present four simultaneous site-specific linked solo shows by John Beattie, Mark Clare, Breda Lynch, and Katrina Maguire in Prehen House and grounds. The house is open Tues-Sunday 2pm-5pm March-October, and at all other times by telephone appointment. There will also be four artist’s catalogues, each launched at a monthly artist’s talk, and four evenings of screenings / performance, one programmed by each artist.
Prehen House website: http://www.geocities.com/colinpeck/prehen.html

Dates of Events:

march 24th: simultaneous opening of the four solo exhibitions
april 27th:Breda Lynch launch and talk and programmed event
may 26th: Mark Clare launch and talk and programmed event
june 30th:John Beattie launch and talk and programmed event
aug: 10th:Katrina Maguire launch and talk and programmed event

There have been two special additions to Context Galleries @ Prehen House:

The first is a satellite project which will present a broader selection of artist's work at the old Orchard Gallery site on Orchard Street, Derry. Dates/artists are:

july 14th - july 28th: The Place of the Crows, Breda Lynch:
aug 4th - aug 18th: Katrina Maguire:
sep 8th- oct 8th: John Beattie.

The second is the Context Galleries education project Sharing Heritage, a series of four specially commissioned art cards, one from each artist, and four cards from the pupils of St Cecilias School, Derry. The project presents work examining individual perceptions of "heritage" sites in the city. The cards will be distributed nationally.

Prehen House is served by and Ulsterbus Foyle route FY6 which departs from Foyle Street in city centre and has a stop outside the entrance to Prehen House at Sunningdale Drive: it departs at 15 minutes past the hour and is a ten minute journey.

Prehen House, Waterside, Derry
Tel: 028 71342829
email: http://www.geocities.com/colinpeck/prehen.html

Context Galleries,
5-7 Artillery Street
Derry BT48 6RG
Tel: 028 71373538
email: contextgallery@yahoo.co.uk

Sara Greavu, 'Love and Theft'

Sara Greavu, 'Love and Theft'
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

Sara Greavu, 'Love and Theft"

Exhibition has been rescheduled to commence in Feb 2007 and run until March 2007

Sara Greavu, originally from the USA, has resided in Derry for over a decade, and is currently completing a practice based PhD at University of Ulster. Previous solo shows include All Souls, Context Galleries, 2003; group shows include The Moore Street Lending Library, Dublin, 2005; b-lomo, Context Galleries, 2003; Resident, as a Context Artist in Residence with Bayview Educational Guidance Centre, 2003.

This series of photos, taken on Halloween 2005 are part of of a larger project I am involved in which deals with displays of ‘ethnic drag’ and whiteness in Ireland. I am fascinated by the prevalence of these costumes portraying ethnic ‘others’ and I am interested in unpicking the reasons for their popularity. Ireland has a long history of blackface performance: almost from the inception of the minstrel show in the US in the 1820s, minstrel shows were a popular form of entertainment here; this endured through most of the 20th century with the (British made) Black and White Minstrel Show being aired here until the early 80s. Given the location of the Context Gallery as part of the Playhouse building, I wanted to refer to this tradition and ask what this modern, homegrown version of minstrelsy says about an Irish concept of identity and otherness. At the same time, Ireland’s colonial history has given it a unique perspective among the nations of Western Europe. There is a sense of solidarity with other colonised or subaltern nations, visible, for instance in the flying of Palestinian flags. I am interested in how these markers of identity sit with the cross-racial mimicry depicted in my work.The photos on the outside of the building are digitally manipulated to isolate the individual figures: the street becomes the ‘black box’ stage and an ersatz lens flare highlights the use of the camera to capture the images, and also places the viewer ‘backstage’ or inside of the performance.The series of postcards The Colonial Harem: Scenes and Types are looking at another popular set of costumes: the ‘harem girl’ or belly dancer. I am relating these images to postcards produced in Algeria and Morocco in the early part of the last century. The faux-ethnigraphic postcards illustrate a Western fantasy or a ‘phantasm’ of harem life and were produced by French photographers for a French audience. These postcards, collected and interpreted by Malek Alloula in his seminal text, The Colonial Harem, were ‘everywhere’ in Algeria, “covering all the colonial space, immediately available to the tourist, the soldier, the colonist…[The postcard] is ubiquitous. It can be found not only at the scene of the crime it perpetrates but at far remove as well.” (Alloula)In the Ireland of today, of increasing immigration and ‘guest workers’, of the citizenship referendum and American troop transports refuelling at Shannon airport en route to Iraq, how can we read these performances of race? Do they work to construct or shore-up a communal sense of nation and ‘whiteness’? Do they, indeed, constitute a performance of whiteness through the means of a masquerade of blackness? Could they also be seen to represent a more ambiguous relationship to the racial ‘other, one of identification, commonality or desire?
Sara Greavu

Miriam de Burca, 'Stealing Weeds'

Miriam de Burca, 'Stealing Weeds'
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

Miriam de Burca, 'Stealing Weeds'

16th December 2006 – 20th January 2007

Miriam de Burca is currently completing a practice based PhD at University of Ulster. Recent projects include: The Golden Mile, Belfast 2003; Veneer/Folheado, Galeria Zedosbois, Lisbon, Portugal 2003; BE+FAST, Ljubljana, Slovenia 2004; The Belfast Way, Herzilya Museum of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel 2005; Perspective, Ormeau Baths, Belfast 2005; Dogs Have No Religion, Artists From Northern Ireland at Czech Museum of Fine Arts, 2006.

Weeds have grown from soil recently fertilised by the ashes of an 11th Night bonfire. The wasteland’s annual cycle of construction and subsequent destruction has entered into its interval phase; the return of the small organisms. Benefiting from the minerals left by the fire, they begin to re-inhabit the area, slowly building up a temporary landscape.

A contradiction in terms, it would seem, ‘stealing weeds’. How can it be stealing if they are only weeds? And, if they are considered to be of no worth, why would one feel the need to go to such lengths? After all, they grow abundantly and thrive wherever the ground offers the minimum requirements for light, nutrition and drainage. They are considered a nuisance; they spring up where they are not wanted. Yet here they are being specially selected, uprooted, and taken away. Should anyone have objected to it?

Is it not a form of colonisation when one aggressively tears at the ground and takes elements of it away for scrutiny?

More important than the question whether digging up the plants is theft or not, is the fact that it feels like theft. The physical act of crossing through the implicit threshold and into the centre of the interface gives the sensation of making an imposition. There is a psychological heat still emanating from the ashen ground that causes one to hurry, to step and dig and leave quickly. (‘Careful or you’ll burn the soles of your feet.’)

Ultimately, there is no feeling of victory, no conquest made. Rather than gaining a sense of ownership over that proximate piece of land, the psychological boundary between ‘here and there’ remains as intact as before, the experience leaving only a slight feeling of guilt; that the weeds had been taken from someone else’s land; de facto stolen.
Miriam de Búrca

@ Flip, a context galleries offsite project

@ Flip, a context galleries offsite project
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

Chris Quinn

Photograph by Chris Quinn at Flip
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

Anne Marie McArdle

Anne Marie McArdle
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

A print by Anne Marie McArdle, showing at Flip

Christine Mackey, Points of Departure

Christine Mackey, Points of Departure
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

Points of Departure, Christine Mackey

Points of Departure
Christine Mackey

gallery one, nov 11 – dec 9

Christine Mackey gained a BA Sculpture in NCAD Dublin 1992, and MA Visual Performance, Dartington College, 2002. She was nominated as one of four finalists for the AIB Award 2004.

The work in this exhibition stems from Christine Mackey’s response to her travels in Central America and particularly her response to the terrain and the people she encountered there. She was artist in residence in Teor e/Tica, San José, the capital and largest city in Costa Rica, located in the center of the country, high on a mountain plateau.

The central premise of this work deals in terms of an anthropological (the study of humankind) practice but one it terms of collecting, through which a local knowledge of place is gained through an ongoing dialogical exchange both physically and virtually. Grant Kester, assistant professor of contemporary art history and theory at Arizona State University, has given a useful description of a dialogical relationship in artwork as follows: “a dialogical relationship that breaks down the conventional distinction between artist, art work and audience - a relationship that allows the viewer to "speak back" to the artist in certain ways, and in which this reply becomes in effect a part of the "work" itself” (Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework For Littoral Art, Grant Kester, Variant issue 9)

Christine Mackey’s method of working, which she terms ‘Process in Motion’ relates to the actual gaining of knowledge about a civilization or community through collation and discoveries. In essence the exhibition is an archival installation of her travels and experiences in Central America and research into its artists and their response to their environment. Thus she decided to build an archive of Central American artists that amounted to small art works, documentation of artists work on CD and DVD, catalogues and books related to Central American artists and current arts practice. She is appropriating methods used by archivists in this project. She doesn’t intend this project to be an exhaustive archive of Central American art and artists. Rather she is using archival methods to visually articulate her personal (and that of the artists she encountered) response to the local environment and populace. She is also entwining her own personal circumstance into the work, in this case the tragic death of her mother, Brigid, in a car accident whilst the artist was in Panama. She is placing subjective experience into mapping and the archiving resulting from that mapping.

The nature and use of archives are being changed, particularly through artists using methods and terminology traditionally used by archivists. Traditionally archives stood for a ‘dead-end’ comprehensiveness where as many documents as possible about a particular subject filled many boxes on dusty shelves. Artists by questioning the nature, role and use of data and their appropriation and creative updating of archival methods have created a debate about the definition of an archive.

Christine Mackey commissioned a number of artists, an art critic and an environmental sociologist to develop textual work or small sketches in relation to a short text that she gave them to respond to. She is interested in the tactics used by individuals and artists to navigate daily existence in environment where local and globalised strategies are imposed upon them by local and outside agencies. In this she is influenced by the French philosopher Michael de Certeau who explored the ‘tactics’ used by people to adapt to ‘strategies’ imposed upon them by for example government. She is also influenced by the anthropologist James Clifford’s recent work concerns the response of local politics to globalization. He is researching the effects of regional, national, and international power on different cultures by studying museums, festivals, tourism, and ethnic performance. Much of his work focuses the decolonization of the pacific region and its impact on the culture of the indigenous people such as native Californians pacific islanders.

This exhibition can be seen as an archival mapping of the artist’s journey in Central America. As the artist puts it: ‘the exhibition thus ‘constitutes an assembly of narratives and interchanges, moving from one place to another; an accumulation of voices between time zones and continents deliberated as a line across space and as a dedication to the memory of Brigid’.

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited edition 90 page full colour catalogue.

North West Visual Arts Archive

Archive
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

Live Archive 0 – 1

North West Visual Arts Archive
@ Context Galleries 2
11th November – 09th December 2006

The North West Visual Arts Archive presents Live Archive 0 – 1 the first of its Live Archive exhibition/project programme. Live Archive 0 – 1 is a linear history of Derry’s now defunct Orchard Gallery in installation form using gallery ephemera such as catalogues, invitation cards, gallery handouts and reviews.

The Orchard Gallery ran from 1978 to 2003 and established itself as an exciting and innovative institution at the forefront of contemporary art showing many of the leading names of Irish, European and world art. It put Derry on the world map as far as contemporary art was concerned. The installation is also an interactive research project which will offer the public the opportunity to contribute their memories, anecdotes and opinions of the gallery to the project thus creating a written narrative to accompany the exhibition. It is important that a regional arts archive protects and explores the local arts heritage of the area, as the nature of visual art is often very ephemeral and easily lost. But with the Live Archive projects this heritage will be updated and added to in an imaginative and thought-provoking manner. It is also very apparent that the meaning of the term ‘archive’ is no longer fixed. Many artists have appropriated archival terminology and strategies and used them in their own work thus there is now a fluidity of definition as to what archiving actually means. The North West Visual Arts Archive recognises this and will explore new methods of articulating the remit of the archive.

The North West Visual Arts Archive aims to accumulate, collate and make publicly available a coherently structured and easily accessible visual arts archive covering the local North West region, encompassing the counties of Derry, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Cavan, Donegal, Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon and Sligo. The archive is continually added to and updated as new documents become available.

The archive is not intended to be merely a passive resource. Rather it is envisaged as a living entity with exhibitions, publications, lectures and workshops evolving from it. The Live Archive project is designed to visually articulate the remit of the archive and as a means of supporting local artistic practice and indeed the contemporary art scene in the North West. Archives have the capacity to cross artistic disciplines and boundaries and use multiple formats to initiate creative dialogue and projects with regard to past, present and future art production in the region.

At the end of Live Art: 0 – 1 The North West Visual Arts Archive will move to its permanent home in the Verbal Arts Centre, Derry though will continue to initiate off-site Live Archive projects, the first planned for spring/summer 2007 being a project looking at Derry art and artists working today.

Thanks to Colin Darke for permission to use his research notes on the early years of the gallery.


Live Archive 0 – 1:
Gregory McCartney: Project Coordinator
Cinza Parola: Research Assistant
Mara Cavalli: Research Assistant

Email: nwarchives@yahoo.co.uk

Alex Cheung, ruBbEr pLaNs

Alex Cheung, ruBbEr pLaNs, video still
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

video still from short film ruBbEr pLaNs

ruBbEr pLaNs, a film by alex cheung

In 2005, Context Galleries received a project award from the Promoting Interculturalism Programme of The Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Community Relations Council. Working with production company Plethora Productions, the project award was dedicated to developing and producing a new film and filmmaking skills base within the young Chinese community of the city of Derry. Rubber Plans, the film produced in the project and screened here, is the first short film by Alex Cheung, born and raised in the city, whose parents moved here from Hong Kong. The filmmaking process involved mentoring and training from Plethora Productions, Blast Furnace Recording Studios and Sound Engineer Kwame Daniels to a crew and cast from the young Chinese community of the city of Derry. Alongside the screenings here, the film Rubber Plans will be promoted to the international film festival circuit, further developing the potential of Northern Ireland’s first film from within the Chinese community.

Film screenings preview 8pm, Oct 7. Film screenings continue until Nov 4.

Nuala Herron, Of Beauty in Ruin

Nuala Herron is a young painter from Derry, currently based in Edinburgh. The artist graduated in BA(Hons) Fine and Applied Art (Painting) at University of Ulster in 2003. Context Galleries is delighted to be bringing new work by this young artist to a first solo exhibition in her home town.

As a painter, I attempt to show beauty in what might often go unnoticed: everyday realities of the Domestic Life of a family, clothes hanging on a washing line, delapidated buildings.

In this collection of paintings I hope to show a glimpse of the frailty and transience of beauty in ruin. These ruins, delapidated and desolate scenes are a manifestation of my understanding of reality.

My paintings often evolve from photographs, some of which were taken while travelling around Europe. Rather than photographing the obvious I was more interested in delapidated buildings,walls and doors. These images were more significant to me and revealed more depth, value and beauty than their peeling surfaces suggested.

While I could appreciate the aesthetic of ruins I was also aware of a certain perversity by which we find pleasure in contemplating decay. With this in mind I have tried to create paintings 'Of Beauty in Ruin' which are honest and engaging.

Exhibition previews 8pm,Oct 7 Exhibition runs until Nov 4th

Nuala Herron, The Bogside

Nuala Herron, The Bogside, 3ftx3ft, oil on canvas
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

This painting was inspired by a photograph taken of my mother during the early part of The Troubles in 1971. It is set in Rosville Street, an area scarred by almost daily rioting, hijacking and vehicle burning. Although much of the scene is bleak and the truck has been burnt out, the prominence of the figure causes this to fade into the background. ( Painting: 3ft x 3ft, Oil on canvas)

Nuala Herron, Closed

Nuala Herron, Closed, 3ftx3ft, oil on canvas
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

From a photograph taken in Havana Cuba, I have attempted to capture the various textures seen on this boarded-up window: the peeling paint,the roughness of the stone,the burnt wood and flimsy cardboard.By building up several layers of paint and then scraping away some layers, I hoped to create a similar texture. (Painting: 3ftx3ft, Oil on canvas )

Nuala Herron, The Pipeline

Nuala Herron, The Pipeline, 3ftx3ft, oil on canvas
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

Despite the poverty and devastation found in India, I have always been attracted to the colours and textures captured in many photographs taken. Having collected photographs for several years I had the urge to paint this particular scene, which shows a pipeline muscling snakelike through a suburb of Mumbai to supply rich areas with plenty of water. (3ftx3ft, Oil on canvas)

Nuala Herron, A Shadow Casted

Nuala Herron, A Shadow Casted, 3ftx3ft, oil on canvas
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

In this painting, I have tried to capture a fleeting moment, something ordinary,everyday and potentially lost. The building itself is slightly decaying and the fact that it is painted prominently in shades of greys and brown enhances this. The white sheet which is being shook from the top window could signify many things, one being the continuity of life. ( painting: 3ftx3ft, Oil on canvas)

Nuala Herron, Besieged by Time

Nuala Herron, Besieged by Time, 3ftx3ft, oil on canvas
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

With an interest in washing lines and the feelings they connote for me, I wanted to bring this into at least one of my paintings. After discovering the photographer Robert Polidori, I came across a photograph called 'Palador La Guarida' from which I took inspiration for this painting. (3ftx3ft, Oil on canvas)

Nuala Herron, Searching

Nuala Herron, Searching, 3ftx3ft, oil on canvas
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

As a realist painter, I have always been drawn to painting older people and find it challenging to capture the the textures of their skin. I saw so much beauty and significance in this searching face which might be seen by many to be lost youth. I thought this was appropriate to include in my exhibition 'Of Beauty in Ruin.'
(3ftx3ft, oil on canvas)

Nuala Herron ‘Beauty in Ruin’

In this collection of paintings the artist attempts to show a glimpse of the frailty and transience of beauty in ruin. Herron is exploring the picturesque, a time-honoured area of investigation for artists though of course putting it into a modern context. Picturesque meaning literally "in the manner of a picture; fit to be made into a picture" was a word used as early as 1703 (Oxford English Dictionary), and derived from an Italian term pittoresco, meaning, "in the manner of a painter," As meaning like beauty is transient the term ‘picturesque’ is now held in some distain and taken to mean simply pretty or charming.

In 18th Century philosophy and criticism it was however a valid stream of artistic exploration holding the middle ground between the beautiful (in the strictly traditional sense of classical i.e. Grecian aesthetic ideals) and the sublime (that appreciation of the vastness and terrible power of nature as articulated in the theories of philosophers Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant). The picturesque borrowed from both extremes, conjoining elements of what was considered at the time ‘ideally’ beautiful (i.e. fitting the philosophical notions of beauty offered by notably the Greek philosopher and statesman Plato) with the non-rational (i.e. wild, instinctual, untamed and possibly dangerous) sublime. The notion of the picturesque was primarily articulated by the clergyman and writer William Gilpin in 1768 in a travel book designed for the English leisured classes, where he defined the picturesque as ‘that is what agreeable in a picture’. His perception of what was ‘agreeable’ however deviated from the norms of the time to include rugged landscapes and decaying buildings and even ‘decaying’ people. The artist includes portraits in her study of the potential beauty of decay and ruin. The equation of human aging with the decay of infrastructure has also a lengthy history which again leads ultimately back (in painting at least) to the theories of the Reverend Gilpin.

Unfortunately the picturesque became a fad and swarms of tourists pounced upon suitably craggy areas of England and Europe which eventually led to the devaluing of the term. Though even in the 19th Century the art critic and poet John Ruskin considered it a genuinely modern aesthetic category. Herron brings the picturesque into the contemporary context in this exhibition by including elements such as a study of an individual (her mother) in a post-riot landscape posing on a hijacked and subsequently burned vehicle and a landscape showing industrial intrusion, decay and pollution in India.

Herron’s paintings are often also studies in surface and colour which show the artist’s interest in portraying to a level which almost reaches the abstract, building facades, doors and shuttered windows. She takes the picturesque and often mixes it with painterly concerns in regard to technique and intertwines comments upon domesticity. These buildings are old and decaying but they are lived in. These areas have a massive pipeline running through it but people live and work there.

The artist often bases her painting on photographs, not always her own, thus appropriating other’s images for her own devices and reinterpreting them to give them new meaning. This can be seen in particular with her reinterpretation of a photograph by Robert Polidori of a building in Havana, Cuba in which the artist articulates her appreciation of decay and beauty and gives prominence to the obvious domestic associations of the building by highlighting the white sheets on the washing line.

(Text by Gregory McCartney)

This the artist’s first solo show in the Context though she did appear in the ‘Take Away’ group show in 2004.
The exhibition runs 7th October – 4th November 2006

Works made in Ballylaw Womens Group with Martha Lewtas embroidery class

Works made in Ballylaw Womens Group with Martha Lewtas embroidery class
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

Greysteel Women's Activity Group with Tina McLaughlin quilting class

IMGP3836
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.

Resident 4

Resident 4

An exhibition of works produced in the 4th year of the Context Galleries Education and Outreach Project: a collaborative project between the following artists and organisations:

Lilliput Theatre Group and Laura Saenz of The Dancing Tree have produced a video entitled ‘What is Love?’ exploring participants perceptions of love.

Greysteel Women’s Activity Group and Tina McLaughlin have made a series of beautiful patchwork quilts that articulate the tradition use of patch-working in the Derry area.

Ballylaw Women’s Group and Martha Lewtas have created a series of delicate embroidered pieces which display great skill and dexterity of all who participated.

Maybrook Adult Training Centre with Tracy Cullen and Danny Mc Laughlin have produced video and a collage of photographs exploring the group’s various activities in locations around Derry.

Finally, Context Galleries is pleased to have part of the Wheelworks ‘Respect’ project in the gallery. This project helps to increase tolerance and respect for each and every community in our society.

Galleries 1 & 2
Exhibition previews 6pm Saturday 2nd September
Exhibition runs until September 30th

Supported by Derry City Council, Adapt, Lottery Awards For All, and The Art Council of Northern Ireland

Peter Hughes, 2006, 12inchesx12inches

Peter Hughes, 2006, 12inchesx12inches
Originally uploaded by contextgalleries.