Stephen Brandes
Though the themes and ideas referenced by this contemporary art centenary exhibition are loose, there are some visual parallels. The Civic Exhibition’s use of printed visual materials – posters, leaflets and such – to spread its message is echoed in the work of Stephen Brandes. Brandes is best known for his banner and poster drawings on lino, creating fantastical, fictional cities with a satirical bite. Beginning with these intricate drawings, Brandes’s practice has evolved to incorporate objects like posters, signs and printed publications that could exist in his mythical, retro-futurist cities. His ideological urban vision, tinged with more than a hint of the totalitarian, will chime with the jostling town plans that once competed with one another for the Civic Exhibition’s coveted prize.
Mark Clare
Mark Clare foregrounds public space and its implicit messages; residential dwellings, their environment and implications are a recurring interest. Past works include Ou-topia, which references the 19th-century literary classic Walden; or, Life in the Woods, by the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau – a soul-searching text on dropping out and opting for a humble existence proximate to nature. Brandes and rebuilt the shack-like residence Thoreau describes in the text and documented it in a photographic triptych. In 2011, he constructed DreamHouse, a temporary structure mimicking the “shotgun houses” of America’s Deep South, while an animation from the same year, DemocraCity, saw his attention turn to the urban environment, using the visual language of architectural plans and Modernist utopianism to demonstrate the dangers of industrialisation, urban sprawl and nuclear power.
Mary-Ruth Walsh
Wexford-based artist Mary-Ruth Walsh touches upon similar themes of architecture, buildings, cities and waste in her drawings, film and sculpture. Some of her best-known pieces explore consumer packaging – plastic blister wraps, or whitewashed commodities, presented with Minimalism pristinity. Yet this clean, pared back aesthetic subtly subverts the implications of consumerism, waste and excess. In an ongoing body of drawings, architecture and commodity collide in product design-style 3D plans; some works hinge upon the oeuvre of Eileen Gray, exploring the architect’s manipulation of space and ‘demystifying’ buildings and objects through two-dimensional representation.
Stéphanie Nava
Perhaps one of the most tangible links to the Civic Exhibition may come from Stéphaine Nava, hose drawings and installation work will look at aerial plans of Marino, Dublin’s first garden suburb and the Irish state’s first real attempt at public housing, initiated in 1924. It’s perhaps one of the most successful manifestations of Geddes and Abercombies’ town planning visions, inspired largely by the Garden Cities movement advocated by Raymond Unwin and Ebenezer Howard. Nava’s previous work has examined the curious politics of allotments – the hybrid urban/rural space they present, and their social history, bound up in the food shortages of World War Two.
Vagabond Reviews
An interdisciplinary arts initiative by artist Ailbhe Murphy and independent researcher Ciaran Smyth, Vagabond Reviews will set up a research station querying the notion of ownership. The duo have always hinged on the axis between art and social studies: past texts have explored the implications ‘of being public’, and examined the Rialto Youth Project. They’ve also assessed the legacy of women’s involvement in the 1913 Lockout during the centenary last year, in a commission from the Women’s Council of Ireland.
Cliona Harmey
Cliona Harmey will take the Le Corbusier-inspired aerial viewpoint one step further to scoop weather satellite views of Dublin’s environs. Reframing digital and virtual space as another form of public space, Harmey’s recent works include an exhibition at Pallas Projects/Studios in April this year, Troposphere, in which real-time data from passing planes was harnessed. The sculptural works in the show explored environmental phenomena, extending to the intangible: broadcasting, light, atmospheric pressure, sound, communication systems, and space itself.
