https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/02/niklas-roy-little-piece-privacy/
Berlin-based artist Niklas Roy isn’t just concerned about his privacy and protection online. To stop passersby from peeping into his workshop, he strung up a white, lace curtain stretching only partially across his window. Titled “My Little Piece of Privacy,” the ironic project from 2010 was established to offer seclusion to the artist, while recording those who walked past his space. Each outside movement triggers a motor to position the thin fabric in front of the person attempting to look inside.
You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.
Louise Bourgeois
The bed is an object that is understood in all social and cultural contexts. Its semiotic language vary from the childhood context of security and play to the more complex context of privacy, intimacy and relaxation. When such a "charged" object is used as a telematic interface the user is confronted by the complexity of the object/interface and not the complexity of the technology. The telematic experience of communication is heightened when the technology involved is secondary to the primary point of importance, the bed interface. The technology disappears and becomes invisible. The bed is a very intensive object. The users are sometimes reluctant to enter "Telematic Dreaming", not because of the video technology, but because of the potential interaction on the bed in the public space.
Shannon Valley, Co. Roscommon, Ireland.
There are 38 houses in the estate; 23 are unoccupied and in various states of disrepair and dereliction.
A single street light standing in a neighbouring, fenced field is all that remains of the final phase of 20 houses that were demolished in 2014 with a “special resolution fund” of €250,000 from the Government.
There were things built that should not have been built
Lorcan Sirr, lecturer in housing studies at Dublin Institute of Technology suggests a novel use for some estates as a lesson to “evidence-free policy” pursued by government during the boom times: “Maybe it is no harm to leave one or two standing as a reminder of what not to do.
Boherbue, Co Cork.
Lios na Gréine in Lismire, Co Cork.
Aberdeen Studio (My Blue Period), 2023, distemper on canvas, 212.9 x 182.4 cm, 83 7/8 x 71 3/4 in
Andrew Cranston’s figurative paintings are steeped in atmosphere; their fragments of narrative quickly dissolving into dreamlike visions of objects awash in colour, shape and texture. His works often depict domestic interior spaces – in a not-so-distant echo of the arrangements of classical still lives – but where such ordinary things as windows, items of furniture, and ornaments become conduits for far more uncanny formal explorations. Abandoned tables, libraries, tents and private chambers are just some of the scenes in which Cranston’s expansive imagination takes shape, drawing from his lifelong interest in storytelling through colour and form. His works take two distinct formats: large scale canvases worked in distemper and oil, and smaller paintings executed directly on hardback book covers. Often his paintings revel in a single colour field, whether oceanic blues, ruddy ochres, or blazing scarlets, within which his dreamlike worlds unfurl through the expressive treatment of surfaces. Their atmospheres flicker between the private and the theatrical, the picturesque and the chaotic, abundance and solitude, each in their own way beckoning the viewer deeper into their worlds.
Rudy and Dolly, 2024, oil on hardback book cover, 23 x 17.2 cm, 9 x 6 3/4 in
Stay with me, my nerves are bad tonight, the midges too, 2022, distemper and oil on canvas, 170.3 x 130.2 cm 67 1/8 x 51 1/4 in
Pim Palsgraaf, Reflections of Emptiness 07, Wood, stained wallpaper, metal, 190 x 50 x 145 cm, 2021. Pim Palsgraaf is inspired by decay and irregularities in the city. The discord between nature and urbanity are relevant topics and perspectives in meta-modernistic thinking. Palsgraaf’s work is a result of an ever-deepening investigation into the erosion of the inner city. Empty spaces – old corridors and ceilings that are about to collapse and where nature is stepping in to take over – nourish his fascination for this process. In his work Palsgraaf focuses on the lines of perspective from which we build the world around us. For a while, Palsgraaf worked within the existing systems of how to draw the world around us, but a few years ago he decided, rather, to investigate the fundamentals of the world around us. The fundamentals, according to Palsgraaf, are in how people construct the world around them. This often leads to dualisms in society. Nihilism and consumerism, irony and naive informality live side by side and simultaneously. Palsgraaf decided to investigate his own perception and spent five days in a completely enclosed dark room, without time or noise. It soon became clear to Palsgraaf that time is only a concept, perception a construction of the mind. He decided to continue with these discoveries and to investigate how he could interweave these findings and translate them into his work. His aim is to convey his experiences of time and perception and to bring the viewer into a moment of silence and total doubt, in which all the hold of the world is completely gone.
Pim Palsgraaf, Burn your bridges 13, Wood, stained wallpaper, carton, 40 x 50cm, 2021.
Pim Palsgraaf, Traces of existence, Wood, stained wallpaper, metal, 320 x 180 x 210 cm, 2017.
My work centers on the notion of what is a home. It is an exploration of that which is most emotive, where is it that we belong, and how can we, in this modern state of upheaval, find our safe place. The paintings query if it is the presence of people that turn a house into a home, and what it says about our community when there are houses left empty. My work centres on the notion of what is a home. It is an exploration of that which is most emotive, where is it that we belong and how can we, in the modern state of upheaval, find our safe place. The paintings query if it is the presence of people that make a house a home, and what is says about our community when building are left empty. I utilise a clean, hard edge technique. Currently I am incorporating three dimensional elements into my work, physically building the scene behind stretched canvas and treating it then as a traditional painting. It is an experimental look at the spaces we occupy.
Kitchen Living, Acrylic on canvas, 2023, 20cm x 20cm.
Wardrobe, Acrylic on canvas, 2023, 20cm x 20cm.
Martha Naranjo Sandoval, Petén 411, 2016-2017
Paper collages. C-prints, archival tape.
Reframing the Past (1984-1994) could also be titled Re-Reading the Family Album. From 1984 to 1994, Sligh’s work centred on a re-investigation and re-evaluation of her family’s photo album. Growing up in the blue collar, black neighbourhood of Halls Hill in Arlington, Virginia in the 1950’s, keeping up the family album was something the artist took great pride in. Not realizing that her early family album project was created through the lens of a stereotypical white American family, she saw the project as making a record of positive images of her black family.
She Sucked Her Thumb, 1989, cyanotype, 27.5 × 21.5 cm (10 13/16 × 8 7/16 in.)
@ The Lord Mayors Pavillion
The Grammar of Home presents moments of domesticity and maps the idea of home, universally held, but the meaning of which is unique to each of us. Home is the space each of us carves out for ourselves- it is in the objects we select, the family we share, and the street we walk everyday. The familiarity of home is both mundane and sublime. In the wake of pandemic when confined to home, and our 2km radius, our collective focus on home, the everyday and our immediate surroundings was heightened. It was through this time that Chris, Colette and Síomha each began their exploration of what constitutes home, and what transforms a building or neighbourhood into home? Through Chris’ interactive work we see a family’s life played out, within familiar games and domestic snap-shots, ……. Colette’s miniature paintings of nostalgic furniture, often found on daft.ie deep-dives, long both for the familiarity of granny’s house and the hope to buy somewhere to create a home. In contrast Síomha’s intimate documentary photography captures the nuanced textures and perspectives of her daily explorations throughout spring 2020. Though often shared and negotiated, home should be a space of sanctuary, of return and comfort. This exhibition is poignant times of war, mass-migration, and the Irish housing-crisis when so many are without a home and striving for its’ security and embrace. ……
Colette Cronin
Colette Cronin, Fireplace
Chris Finnegan,
Síomha Callanan