Catalyst Arts is pleased to present a solo show by the Irish artist Fiona Larkin. Larkin has developed a new body of video work titled Backstory which involves writers responding to the character in the accompanying photograph. Thematically the work oscillates between fiction and documentary. The audience are encouraged to create rather than translate meaning.
Fiona Larkin artist and writers talk – discussion and readings – 07.12.2013 1pm
Opening preview: Thursday 5th December 6-9pm
Exhibition dates: Friday 6th December 2013 – Friday 17th January 2014
Aisling O’Beirn | Thorsten Fleisch | Pól Murphy | Christian Cherene | Richard Box
Forces is a group exhibition that investigates artists that relinquish control to natural forces or attempt to harness them in their work.
Each work is made from found objects that, by exploiting specific scientific properties of the materials, the artists have created dynamic works where functional objects are re purposed and become animated.
Radiation, electricity, electrical resonance, entropy and gravity are manipulated in order to create works where the final outcome is uncertain.
Frequently flirting with danger, the exhibition becomes a high energy, tense environment.
Exhibition dates: Friday 8th November – Friday 29th November 2013
Dorothy Cross | Emmanuelle Negre | Marie Farrington | Laura McMorrow | Jacqueline Holt
A Subtle Matter was an exhibition that predominantly focused on fragility. A discrete set of works by artists from the UK, France and Ireland prompted considerable movement within the gallery space. The artists explored the theme through video, sculpture and installation. Using the aforementioned mediums to engage with space, light and time. The show constantly changed; thus creating intrigue and excitement to highlight miniscule the happenings.
The 10th edition of FIX performance art festival will be held 4th – 20th September 2013 in Catalyst Arts Gallery and around the city centre of Belfast.
FIX 13 is the tenth installment of Europe’s longest running performance and live art biennial. Established in 1994, FIX has sought to bring together a dynamic and diverse range of local and international practitioners across a variety of city centre and site-specific locations.
Bringing together both emerging and established artists and performance collectives, FIX 13 will launch with an open platform at Platform Arts on 4th September for all those wanting to be involved.
This is the most heavily programmed FIX to date, with over twenty performances across a two week period. FIX 13 is an integral part of Catalyst Arts’ twentieth anniversary celebrations.
Participants include: Amanda Coogan | Bbeyond | Charlotte Bosanquet | Colm Clarke | CROW | David Fagan | Debbie Guinnane | Essi Kausalainen | Katharina Greeven | Janks Archive | Marcel Sparmann & Mayte Kappel Rovira | Mediations: The Map is not the Terrain | Mitch Conlon | Nora Jacobs | Phil Hession | Rob Ireson | Remi Voche | Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell | Tonya McMullan | Unit1 | Triple AAA.
Liam Crichton | Flora Moscovici | Phil Hession | Brain Patterson | Eoin Dara | Deirdre McKenna | Rob Hilken | Mark Orange
Susan MacWilliam | Christoff Gillen | Craig Donald | Benji De Burca | Joanna Fursmann | Heather Allen | Alice Clark
Jean-Baptiste Ganne | John Matthews | Miguel Martin | Ben Craig | John Cashin | Alastair MacLennan | Niamh O’Malley | Nevan Lehart
Amy Brooks | Daniel Jewsbury | Siofra Campbell | Brian Connolly | Fuyuka Shindo | Helen Sharp | Jane Butler | Keef Winter
Tonya McMullan | Phillip McCrilly | Colin Darke | Lyndsey McDougall | David Mahon | Charlotte Bosanquet | Colm Clarke
Allan Hughes | Seamus Harahan | Phil Collins | David Sherry | Katrina Sheena Smyth | Aisling O’Beirn
Eva Isleifsdottir & Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir | Karen Vaughn | Sinead Bhreathnach-Cashell | Hugh O’Donnell | Barbara H Larkin
Duncan Ross | Stephen Millar | Dougal McKenzie | Caelan Bristow | Kim McAleese | Joanne Proctor | Mary McIntyre | Peter Richards
Keike Twisselmann | Breda Lynch | Clodagh Emoe | Maurice Doherty | Gerard Carson | Michael Hanna | Elina Medley
Jonathon H S Ross | Brendan O’Neill | Zoe Murdoch | Caelan Bristow | Aisling O’Beirn | Iain Griffin | Cian Donnelly | Jordan Hutchings
Kevin Gaffney | Dan Shipsides | Ursula Burke | Fiona Larkin | Brian J Morrison | Una Walker | Sinead O’Donnell | Sara O’Gorman
I Heart Catalyst Arts was a fundraising event organised as part of Catalyst’s 20th Birthday Programme. The event consisted of a fundraising raffle, offering ticket buyers the chance to acquire works by a range of different artists, some local and emerging, others international and established. Catalyst invited previous directors and artists who have exhibited at Catalyst in the last twenty years to make and donate a piece of work in a medium of their choice. These works were in turn entered into a raffle where the raffle tickets cost £15. The pieces were exhibited online and in the gallery for a period of time before the birthday party; allowing visitors to view the works in the run up to the raffle and offering the Belfast public a chance to experience a broad overview of the visual art scene across Northern Ireland.
Participating Artists: Kurt Johannessen/Pavana Reid | Monika Gunther/Ruedi Schill | Nathan Walker/Victoria Gray | Paul Carter/Alexandra Zeirle | Paul Coillard/EdJohnson
DUO DAYS is a performance art event, inviting artist couples from around the world, (artists in a relationship, collaborating in performance) to investigate the theme of duality. Through collaborative performances we observe how two people who co-exist and co-inhabit through performance art as well as domestically, utilize this closeness and intuitiveness which their relationship affords, providing opportunity to further test the nature of relationships; from domestic life to social ethics, from mind and body to art and audience. Duo performances demonstrate how exchange and dialogue in the live moment can reflect upon interconnectedness in the wider sphere of social responsibility.
Long Drawn Out is a contemporary drawing show that focuses on processes of production that include time-based drawing, performance and mechanically assisted drawings where authoritorial control is sometimes relinquished.
The participating artists are: John Beattie, Séamus Dunbar, Tim Knowles, Alice Maher, Christine Mackey and Jonathan Ross.
Ciaran Hussey / Aisling Kane / Tonya McMullan, with Jordan Hutchings / Duncan Ross / Andrea Theis
The practitioners featured in this exchange between Catalyst Arts (Belfast) and Monstertruck are all connected to and/or based in Belfast – a city that is often subject to misrepresentation as a result of frequently one-dimensional, myopic (international) press coverage of events.
The works shown in P.O.V. (points of view) in different ways examine, subvert or challenge ideas surrounding the theme of representation, questioning how a perception of a particular place, subject or of the human condition can be mediated by the method used to portray it.
Dead Air, Ciaran Hussey’s three-channel video/sound installation, explores the themes of expectancy, media representation and the deferral of arrival.
Referencing The Theatre of the Absurd – particularly Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ with its themes of failure and breakdown of communication – Dead Air features found footage of TV reporters in stasis and unaware of the gaze of unseen viewers as they await some form of response, command or instruction from those behind the camera.
The redressed power balance and altered relationship between subject and viewer generates an uneasy state of suspense; the humorous, awkward atmosphere amplified by the waiting room-esque melody of a generic, midi-file version of the song ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’. Hints of vulnerability, confusion, dissatisfaction, vanity and boredom interrupt the reporters’ normally carefully constructed onscreen confidence and scripted emotional reactions.
Plate 36 from Goya’s The Disasters of War depicts an army officer taking pleasure from his installation of a corpse. The image of Lynndie England, joyfully posing with a row of naked and masked Abu Ghraib prisoners, has become notorious – the photo ‘tableaux’ constructed by her and her fellow soldiers perpetuating through the World Wide Web as a collaborative opera aperta.
Duncan Ross’s Fail is an object extruded from this image, selected for its meme status as one of the most disseminated and widely re-appropriated images available online.
Roughly the size of a typical computer screen image, the cross stitches mimic pixilation and provide a disconcerting contrast between the handmade quality of the object and the subject matter of the original image – domestic labour used to sew a folktale from its palette of flesh and military. Ross outsourced the fabrication of the piece to Wai-Fun Wong, introducing an additional state of mediated reproduction.
Many of those living in the area of north Belfast known as the Ardoyne, especially men, are often misrepresented in the media. By taking portraits of close friends and members of her family, Aisling Kane aims to redefine and reclaim a place that is still regarded with unease, offering a different, unmediated perspective of what could be considered to be a ‘hidden’ community.
Photographed in domestic spaces, Kanezo, James and Gabe provide an account of men from this community who, in their half-naked, tattooed state, appear almost vulnerable and yet are also powerful and iconic. They are depicted in a situation and context that, in collaboration with Kane, has ultimately been determined, decided and approved by them.
“The Lure of the Local is the pull of place that operates on all of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation”.
The postcard is a nostalgic artefact – an unsealed message imbued with memory, distance and the ideals of tourism. Here You Go began as a participatory postcard project that invited members of the public to mark and describe a place of significance on a postcard mapping a mile radius (with the gallery PS² in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter at its centre)
Since then these locations and recollections have been photographed by Jordan Hutchings and Tonya McMullan. The photographs aim to capture the locality as it is today while still referencing the personal significance of the initial contributor.
37 of the original 60 postcards and their re-imagined doubles are now on display at Monstertruck. They show views and recollections of the city, of the places that are and the places that were, presented by those living in it.
The touristic act of photographing Weimar’s iconic monument of Goethe and Schiller in Andrea Theis’s mixed media installation Reviewing Image Disturbance serves to generate meaning for the visitors to this site – a record of their presence in a city that has created a (cultural) identity for a German nation. Theis’s intervention, carried out over a period of five days, questions this experience. Her presence at the monument, and in the images taken of it, places her in a situation where she is at once in a position of power and also highly vulnerable, exposing herself to a range of responses from tourist faced with this unexpected interruption (documented on the wall-mounted image panels).
The video documentation of the work is projected on to the window of the gallery, creating an interplay between the time-lapse CCTV footage of crowds visiting the statue in Weimar and the unceasing flow of passers-by and tourists traversing Dublin’s busy Temple Bar district.
The methods used to visually represent a subject or place are becoming increasingly problematic in a society in which visual imagery holds so much currency and its distribution is instantaneous and widespread. What is undisputable in each of the works in P.O.V. (points of view)is an awareness of the inherent power vested in the act of capturing, (re-) appropriating and (re-) presenting an image.
Neil Carroll / Jane Fogarty & David Lunney / Helen Hughes Tadhg McSweeney / Maggie Madden / Liam O’Callaghan
31st May – 29th June, 2013
Opening reception: Thursday 30th May, 6pm – 8pm
Monster Truck’s exhibition will look at at how seven sculptors, two working collaboratively, utilise walls and other vertical gallery surfaces in a variety of different ways that is essential to their work, whether laying bare the processes of artistic design, using painterly techniques to expand narratives, elaborating into three dimensions from two, or amplifying the dialogue between construction and representation. The show will not be a typical ‘in the round’ affair, with floor works being tethered to the wall in various ways.
Nailing Jelly to the Wall
Picture a flag. Imagine it bears your colours. In your configuration. No family crests, officious insignia, or figurative depictions. Just your own, personal abstraction / When Ardal O’Hanlon was on RTÉ’s Late Late Show to champion Sean Scully’s WallofLightOrangeYellow in a tie-in for the 2012 TV programme Masterpiece: Ireland’s Favourite Painting[i] he readily admitted it was an impossible sell. ‘People hate that’ he assured us of the work / The relationship between sculpture and walls in a gallery context is most commonly a mixture of demarcation and work being provided a neutral vertical backdrop, rarely extending to physical dependence, conceptual support or aesthetic necessity / Your flag is lying on the floor / We have found that artwork which is too sympathetic to interior workspaces can become invulnerable to theft, being utterly invisible / When the ‘personal space’ of sculpture is hemmed by an additional plane there can be a co-adoption between the two. It is often an anomaly – not there to augment a gallery environment, but to annex part of its space (& time) as a temporary egress for viewers / A Neanderthal male and female walk into a clearing in the forest. Before them, a modernist domestic dwelling of the International Style. They enter the white building / Your flag is flying at the top of a flagpole / Our relationship to sculpture is largely based upon the x/y axis of the horizontal plane – our everyday form and positions gravitationally bound / We embrace the possibility of failure, even when cogent offers abound to join dots left floating for us / It goes that if artworks have a job, this is telling a story, imbuing a message, recording something for prosperity. Many assume these abilities are defunct in abstraction / Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic[ii] / On the one hand, a simple proposition – an elemental visual lexicon full of possibility. On the other, frustratingly esoteric visual gibberish / Your flag is pinned to a wall, displaying its form clearly, its staff 30° to the horizon.
NielCarroll makes sculptural paintings and painterly sculptures, sometimes pairing them, with a clear, open dialogue between the elements which make up his installations. They seem to aspire to the worked surface as an ideal, but a malleable, even playful one, reminiscent of what an architect might three-dimensionally sketch if deprived of pencils and paper, doodling within the perimeters, deprived of a margin.
HelenHughes utilizes both found objects and an array of purchased industrial products in her practice. Like an inventor tinkering in their workshop, she throws away the instruction book – end-product finishing points of manufactured goods being her starting point. Her sculptures are rarely inert – possessing and excising a palpable latent energy upon their surroundings. Her skill is in knowing where to subsequently stop and begin anew in the viewer realm. We might at first, like the artist, do this by pondering the teetering de(con)structive possibilities innate in its manifestation.
In Revolving Construction, we are privy to the inner workings of a phantasmagorical magic lantern. Even at his most abstract, TadhgMcSweeney’s work seems homely. Much of his material is detrital and used as if almost to evoke the childhood skill of configuring disparate objects to conjure so much more than the sum of their parts
MaggieMaddenis interested in system schemata of all types. In Flow, a tangle erupts vertically, diagonally and horizontally towards its (open) end, while her Drawings close in upon themselves in an apparent, infinite conclusion – one akin to a Möbius strip being wired into an invisible fuzzbox[iii].
LiamO’Callaghan has a sensitive command in matters of volume and scale, which is readily apparent in the spatial economy of his sculptural work. With his sculpture InthisMomentofStillSurrender, we are enticed to interpret a curious configuration. We might choose between reading a line of supplication, fear, generosity, or a darkly comic gesture with no need of a punchline. In his CompanionStructures series, he pins the dimensionality of his photographed objects (and subsequent digital interventions thereof) to a single vista, impossible to prove impossible by the imagination.
JaneFogarty&DavidLunney‘s AdornedDocuments addresses the fetishisation of the various constituents {information panels, objects, paraphernalia, documentation} that make up the experience of consuming art – it rarely being bestowed to the world in a contextual vacuum. Here, process, interpretation, design and presentation are melded into a flexile loop which can be entered into at any point.
[i] imaginary tagline: “if you like X-Factor you’ll probably tolerate this and mightn’t even notice one of the paintings is a stained glass window”.
Exhibiting Artists : Alisson Gothz, Yiftach Belsky, Jonathan Schmidt-Ott, Marilyn Gaffney, Tom Ridout, Suman Kabiraj,
Anastasia Savinova, Sebastian Reiser, Gregor Schlatte, Viktoriya Beshparova, Vlado Alonso, Ebrahim El Moly, Noor Iskandar,
Rola Khayyat, Kevin Traynor, Nicolas Lamas, Robert Ellis, Lucía Luna, Martin McGagh, Barbara H. Larkin, Algimantas P. Kaveckis,
Damian Magee, Andrea Wenglowskyj, Oscar Ledesma, Jon Delgado, Jack Latham, Lea Golda Holterman, Sabina Grasso, Samantha Harvey,
Ar Do Rothar, David Nugent, Ann Mansolino, Ruby Wallis, Rowan D G Corkill, Katherine Mitchell, John O’Toole, Ashle Bailey, Kristian Smith.
In conjunction with the Belfast Photo Festival, Catalyst Arts has selected photographs from a local, national and international open call of emerging photographers. Catalyst will present a slideshow projection of the chosen work at Love and Death on the 7th of June. From the 8th of June the photographs will then be projected at The Black Box intermittently throughout the Belfast Photo Festival.
PAUL CHAZAL | EARS | HOLD^UP | MARTIN HYDE & ADRIEN AROUD | LAWRENCE STREET WORKSHOP | TWELVE/ELEVEN
UNDERCONSTRUCTION will feature works-in-progress made by local and international artists and collectives. This exhibition aims to question collective experience and the relationship between artistic process and the audience’s experience of a finished ‘product’. UNDERCONSTRUCTION invites visitors to view all stages of the set-up and actively participate in upcoming associated workshops (EARS) and open calls (Hold^Up and Untitled Gallery).
Featuring
Sinéad Bhreathnach-Cashell, Ms Clare Biddles, Linda Monks & Uke Belfast
Tucked away in a charming lane this stunning 0.0478-acre campsite offers a beautiful location for relaxing holidays. Play games and if you’re feeling adventurous sunbathe indoors. Or why not while away an afternoon on our bijou golf course, a shining symbol of all that is the very best in contemporary golf. If it’s hidden gems with friendly staff you’re after, then make sure you include Catalyst Campsite on your itinerary.
Facilities
• We accommodate up to 5 tents
• The campsite offers excellent toliet facilities
• The campsite is open 1st-16th March 2013
Grid Ref: NW460296
Elevation: 8m
Activities
The Catalyst Campsite offers a range of activities to keep everyone occupied. Surrounded by 1.7 km of trails, there’s plenty of space for walking.
If you’re feeling adventurous, we also offer:
a beach
arcade
tumbleweave racing
lawn sports
shadow puppetry
stone painting
100% safe indoor sunbathing (may only result in a fake tan)
With our evening entertainments zone, there’s more than a day can hold.
Exhibiting Artists : Alessandra Giacinti, Liam Crichton, John Duncan, Jacqueline Holt and Stephen
Madden
9 March – 14 April 2013
Lismore Castle Arts: St Carthage Hall
The works selected for In a Certain Light engage with ideas surrounding alternative narratives
and shifting physical and liminal spaces in a variety of media, including drawing, sculpture and
photography.
Exhibiting Artists : Niall de Buitléar | Erin Doherty | Clodagh Emoe | Helena Hamilton | Peter Marley
OUT|TUO is an exhibition that will showcase work by five selected artists who use their work as a way of enquiry into the abstract nature of human thought. Working in an ephemeral nature these artists explore their inner workings that are made accessible to the external world, often in an engaging manner.
O U T | T U O | Workshop events
Tuesday 22nd January | Goal Setting
12:00 – 13:00 Fergal O’Malley from VAI will give a talk about the transition between student and artist 13:15 – 15:00 Personal Planning and Action Plans – with Catalyst Arts director’s Alice Clark & Katrina Sheena Smyth
Wednesday 23rd January | Artist Tools
12:00 – 13:00 Brendan O’ Neill from QSS will give a talk on his experience in receiving artist submissions for
exhibitions. Followed by a presentation on the handling and transportation of artwork.
13:15 – 14:00 Professional tools that support our practice with Catalyst Arts director Katrina Sheena Smyth
14:00 – 14:45 How to write an Artist Proposal with Catalyst Arts director Alissa Kleist and Amy Brooks
15:00 – 16:00 The importance of promoting your practice with Catalyst Arts director’s Rob Hilken & Ruaidhri Lennon
Thursday 24th January | Building Art Relationships
12:00 – 13:00 The importance of volunteering and being involved in the arts with past-director of Catalyst Arts Deirdre McKenna.
13:15 – 13:45 Iain Griffin will talk about his experience gained from working on Art Magazine Critical Bastards
13:45 – 14:15 Anthony Champa will give a talk about the experience of running Array Studios 14:30 -16:00 – Katrina Sheena Smyth will give a brief talk about the OUT|TUO exhibition followed by a screening of
Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present
Thursday 31st January | 18:00 – 19:30 | Participatory Performance Art Workshop with Brian Patterson
This workshop will introduce aspects of intention, what is the place of intention in performance art in general and particularly in respect to improvisational or process work? Individually, what are our main intentions and collectively can there be any unifying intentions behind improvisational or process work?
Thursday 31st January | 18:00 – 19:30 | Psychic Sleep and Collective Thought with Clodagh Emoe
Clodagh Emoe will give a lecture on Psychic Sleep and Collective Thought.
